“It’s taken many names, shapes and forms over the centuries – the conversation chair, the courting bench, a tête-à-tête, a chaperone chair, the vis-à-vis, gossip chair or the indiscret. Considered the pinnacle of sophistication and style during the Gilded and Victorian age, if you were entertaining the fashionable elite, one simply wasn’t running a home worth visiting without a conversation chair in one’s parlour.
Conceived in 19th century France, the basic setup consists of two seats conjoined in a serpentine shape, allowing the sitters to discreetly have a conversation. Without a table creating distance between them, they’re able to speak more intimately and quietly, while also preventing too much physical contact by virtue of a shared armrest cleverly doubling as an elegant barrier of sorts.
This suited Victorians very well. Budding courtships of the era often unfolded with the close supervision of parents or chaperones and the conversation chair effectively became a popular feature of the household for pushing a potential match in the right direction, while still keeping it all very PG-13.
Adding a third seat to the scenario turns it into the ‘chaperone chair,’ or what we might prefer to call a ‘third-wheel chair,’ convenient for a young lady’s governess to be certain nothing untoward was being discussed by the couple. But the true backstory of the conversation chair may not be entirely romantic…
The two-way and three-way chairs were wildly popular during France’s Second Empire where they first originated. The two-seater was known as ‘le confidant,’ indicating that it was intended for confidential conversations; between political confidants, for example. Taking on a propellor-like form, the three-way chairs were known as the ‘indiscret’ (indiscreet), in honour of the third person who would be sticking their nose into a private conversation. Napoleon distributed them throughout his ministers’ apartments in the Louvre, as if to encourage his advisors and subjects to eaves-drop on each other.
Indeed, these chairs were designed with bad habits in mind, to facilitate the indiscreet gossip and whispering that was so rampant in 19th-century French salons. Only history knows what secrets were plotted, exchanged and overheard across those three-way upholstered chairs.”