How the F300 was brought back

When Pierre Paulin unveiled the F300 in the late 1960s, nothing looked like it. Sculptural, futuristic, a chair typology that didn't quite exist before — and fiendishly hard to manufacture.

For decades that difficulty kept it rare. Reviving it was less a matter of nostalgia than of engineering: could the chair Paulin imagined finally be made exactly as he drew it?

A shell, engineered

GUBI's revival is a feat of production. The shell is formed by injecting HiREK pellets through multi-station moulding machines, then hand-refined, smoothed with ceramic tools, and left to stabilise for a full 24 hours before it moves on.

The audacity of the 1960s, with the technology of today.

That pause matters. Letting the shell rest and settle is the difference between a form that holds its geometry for decades and one that quietly distorts — the sort of detail a faithful reissue gets right and a shortcut does not.

Upholstery borrowed from the car industry

The cover is where the craft becomes invisible. The upholstery borrows from luxury car interiors: a thermoforming technique wraps precision-cut foam in fabric so the cover follows every curve without a pucker or a seam out of place.

On a shape as continuous as the F300, ordinary tailoring would fight the form. Thermoforming lets the textile behave like a second skin, which is what Paulin's drawings always implied but the technology of his day couldn't deliver.

Paulin's vision, finally exact

The result is Paulin's vision, made as he imagined it rather than as the 1960s could manage. It is a reminder that a reissue can be more faithful than the original — not by changing the design, but by finally meeting it.

For a collector that is the appeal of the F300: a genuinely radical mid-century form, produced to a standard its own era could only aspire to.