Look at the folding chair through the ages and you discover a motley crew. A quick scout around most people’s garage or shed will reveal one horror or another. Anything from rugged but ugly 1970s plastic camping chairs with aluminium legs, so well made they’re still in circulation, to state of the art fisherman’s chairs and traditional striped canvas and wood deck chairs.

Oddly enough, quality folding chairs for indoor use are still fairly rare. Which is odd when the amount of space we have to live and work in is shrinking by the decade. Luckily while there hasn’t exactly been a creative revolution in folding furniture design, the chair side of things is looking very bright indeed.

Top designers Douwe Jacobs and Tom Schouton’s folding chair is the best in breed. And it’s as practical as a very practical thing from an extremely practical place. This is what great design is all about. Taking a leaf out of the Arts & Crafts Movement’s book, they’ve paid equal attention to function and beauty. All of which makes life a great deal easier for the growing number of us whose homes, offices, premises and working spaces are shrinking so fast the reduction is almost visible to the naked eye!

The remarkable Flux folding chair is about as far from the humble camping chair or deckchair as you can get. It’s enormously durable and tough. It’s easy to keep clean. It takes up to 160kg in weight – that’s an impressive 25 stone in old money. It’s perfect for indoor and outdoor use, in any weather. It’s good looking enough to grace any contemporary or eclectic interior without making you wince. And it comes in a choice of eight glorious colours to suit any and every taste, from classic red to bright orange, black, lemon-lime, white and two shades of grey.

Best of all is the folding action itself. What a grin. The Flux folding chair opens up smartly via just two simple, elegant folds. And folds back up again into an incredibly compact ‘envelope’ equally quickly and easily with a simple string pull.

In short it’s a little masterpiece. You can store up to six of them flat in a special and very neat wall mount. They’re perfect for business, leisure and pleasure, indoors and out. Take yours camping, fishing, picnicking or to this summer’s must-go festival. It’s a chair for life and you’ll find the price is reasonable enough to keep you smiling.