To start with there are many conflicting opinions about what exactly qualifies a chair to be called a tub chair. Most people in the know though agree that any chair that has a single piece curved back that makes up both the arms and the back of a chair can be called a tub chair. To many it is the essence of simple and understated modern furniture as it is so different from the overly fussy and sometimes uselessly intricate pieces of furniture that were favoured until just a few decades back. This is true as these days you are more likely to see a it in a modern upmarket apartment or in a trendy club as their clean and minimalist lines go so well with modern interiors.
This has led many people to believe that the it is in fact a modern piece of furniture that was invented perhaps at the earliest in the sixties when a lot of other modern space age looking styles of furniture were designed by furniture designers who were inspired by the moon missions and the jet age. This is in fact untrue and a lot of the evidence available to historians today seems to point to one man as the father of the modern tub chair as we know it today. This man is Josef Hoffman, an architect and a designer who taught at the Vienna school of arts and crafts. His chair was then known as a Hoffman chair and it truly caught on a few decades later at the turn of the twentieth century when one of the most spectacular archaeological finds ever was made in Egypt by Howard Carter.
The unearthing of the tomb of King Tutankhamen led to many startling discoveries and fired the imagination of people the world over. One of these discoveries was that the Egyptian throne chairs were a kind of tub chair or Hoffman chair albeit a bit more flat. The back and arms were indeed a single piece in the style of the tub chairs but they were flat. This fired up a huge amount of interest in Hoffman's design and people around the world stated to buy these chairs as the frenzy for all things related in any way to Egypt hit its peak.
Today the tub chair is once again seeing a period of renaissance as its clean and uncluttered lines seem to fit into our modern world just as well as it fit into ancient Egypt.