Products, a furniture company, and later for Morris & Co. in Glasgow, which specialized in plywood products. Pieck was involved in technology, but also in the design of new laminated products, such as golf club heads, helicopter rotor blades and his second chair, the Bambi, a beautiful but rather fragile side chair, also made of one sheet of bent plywood. Two-thousand Bambi chairs were produced. Pieck did well at Morris & Co. and was asked to set up a factory for the company in British Guyana in 1950, but the outbreak of the Korean War made this impossible. Disappointed, Pieck left the company he had worked for with so much satisfaction and, seeking a new challenge, he left for Brazil in 1951. There he started a plywood factory for the Brazilian government and a few years later became technical engineer for Moveis Cimo, a furniture factory with 23,000 employees. Meanwhile in Scotland, Morris & Co, without Pieck’s knowledge, produced a less fragile version of the Bambi, the Tobi, with a metal frame.

In the late 1970s, Pieck, ever the adventurer, left the wood business and opened a photo laboratory in Rio de Janeiro. He worked with many professional photographers and received large orders from the government to develop satellite photos. A few years later, he sold his business and moved to Bahia in the north of Brazil, then sailed around the world in his own yacht for more than a year, before returning to Bahia, where he bought some property and designed and built a beach hotel.

Pieck rarely saw his family in the Netherlands and was not aware of the interest in vintage 20th-century design in Europe and the United States. Not until 2002, at the age of 79, when he received the newspaper article and photograph from his sister, did he learn about the international fame of his LAWO 1 chair. When he visited Holland four years later, he once again realized how comfortable his chair was; sitting on it, he recounted the true story of the LAWO 1 to the Dutch media.

Full of enthusiasm, Pieck returned to Brazil and started sketching furniture again. At the age of 84, he intends to set up a new factory to reissue the LAWO 1.

Anyone looking for 10,000 chairs?

Wiet Hekking is the owner of WonderWood, a gallery specializing in vintage and contemporary plywood furniture, in Amsterdam, www.wonderwood.nl.