Extempore chairs

Extempore – trendsetter and classicIf Extremis can take credit for anything, it is the enormous boost it gave to outdoor design furniture in the last decade. In the mid nineties, that market was not nearly as large as now. In its early years, Extremis had to grow step by step and Dirk Wynants had to concentrate more on the business side than on the design side of his young company, which targeted multiple foreign markets right from the start. After the launch of Gargantua in 1994, it would take Extremis four years to introduce the Extempore range, which has in the meantime become a real design classic signed Arnold Merckx.

If you take a contemporary view of Extempore, you probably wouldn't find it very innovative. In 1998 however, combining wood and aluminium was really trendsetting. Innovation was furthermore subtly present in other aspects of the range. Extempore is for instance a comprehensive and modular outdoor furniture range offering solutions for really all day-to-day functionalities such as sitting, dining, lying, relaxing, reading, etc.

Its major innovation however is invisible to the end user: With the Extempore range the production of waste material has been kept to a minimum. Each (wooden) element can be used on any product within the range. Originally the wood furthermore originated from areas managed by nature conservation organisations and nowadays Extremis still exclusively uses FSC labelled wood. Also in this regard Extremis was truly trendsetting...