FAQs

The most difficult part is when we stitch the edge of each leather cover. It's a 4 meters long and 4 cm wide leather piece that it's folded to make the rounded part while is stitched. Another difficult part is when we dye the leather and make the right color as we also depend on appropriate climate conditions.

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10) Where are the challenges by crafting it by hand instead of using machines? 

Each leather cover is unique because its handmade and reflects the moment it was made. Our expert team of designers and leather craftsmen work with the highest quality Argentine hides and leather to ensure every chair retains the quality and customized touch we guarantee our clients.

Masterfully dyed, stitched, and stamped by hand the butterfly leather cover is made of 100% vegetable tanned saddle leather that, like a fine wine, ages beautifully. The supporting iron frame is both sleek and durable more than lifetime. Made exclusively in a fair trade environment, each piece takes our master artisans three days to complete.

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11) Where do get the leather? 

When we affirm that our Polo leather covers will last a lifetime, most people can't imagine a product that lasts a lifetime and even improves with age. But, at least with quality leather chairs, this is definitely the case, a result of a combination between 2 main advantages from our Argentinian leather.

1) Grass fed production. Argentina it's one of the largest producers of natural beef and leather in the World. Most of our cattle production is in the Northwest of Buenos Aires, large extensions of flat grasslands and the mild weather enable free-range farming and abundance. Moreover, cows do not require feed balancing, a crucial point in this matter, and consequently, cows provide a fibrous and elastic material which, after being processed, becomes a fine grain, flexible, soft, durable and resistant product.

2) Vegetable tanned leather: we use vegetable tannins from trees located in the north of Argentina that make a deliciously scented product with woody and sweet notes.

Another difference are the borders and the stitches. When you see our Vaqueta leather cover is crafted making a rounded border and thin thread (but same strenght to support 160 kg). Polo leather cover is made with flat edges and thicker thread, same used for sewing saddles. When we craft the Polo leather cover we make a border of 4 meters long and 3 cm wide that it's stitched and makes the cover even stronger, the result is 6,4 mm edge thickness. 

Vaqueta rounded border:

 Polo border: 

15) Difference between Polo London and Polo Malbec color.

Both are dyed using the same brown vegetable tanning, but the Polo Malbec has a reddish touch (15% red tannin in the mix).

16) Big BKF leather  butterfly chair dimensions:

The Tripolina is narrower than our Big BKF butterfly chair.

Our dimensions:

Chair open:

35,4 inches (90 cm) height

26 inches (67 cm) wide

32 inches (81 cm) depth

Folded up and inside carrying tote bag = 42 inches high (106 cm)

Seat leather cover:

28 inches (72 cm) top wide

27 inches (69 cm) bottom wide

36,2 inches (92 cm) middle stitching length

49,6 inches (126 cm) diagonal

Weight of the chair + leather = 6.4 kg / 14 pounds

MEASUREMENTS: 35,4"H x 26"W x 32"D // 90 cm H x 67 W x 81 D

MATERIALS: Argentinian saddle leather + lenga fueguina wood + iron hinges

 3 FRAME COLORS: Natural light wood, Oak wood and Wengue (black) wood. 

18) How we ship the chair?

Packaging Characteristics:

 • Recyclable: Since it is 100% polypropylene.

 • Waterproof: Do not change their physical properties when immersed in water or other aqueous products.
 
• Resistant to chemicals: It is inert to most chemicals, organic and inorganic, including acids, bases and salts.
 
• Soft: It resembles, at low weights, the texture of a fabric.
 
• Porous: Air permeable and impermeable to small solid particles (dirt, dust, etc.) and liquids under certain conditions.
  
• Heat resistant: Does not begin to shrink to 110 º C and melts at 130 º c.

19) The leather will stretch?

With regards to the fit of the leather, after sitting in the chair for a week or so, it should mold and stretch to look like the chairs on our site- the more you use them, the softer the leather becomes. 

 
20) How to care the leather?

21) Online Purchasing

All of our orders can be placed online through our secure automated store managed by Shopify.

Accepted Payments

We accept all major credit cards for online payment.

22) Return Policy

We are a small Workshop located in Buenos Aires and every sale is a big investment for us, so we stand behind the quality of everything we sell. We make every effort to select and ship hand-made products of the highest-grade materials crafted by highly skilled artisans.

If there is a problem with your order, contact us within three (3) days of receipt via e-mail at info@bigbkf.com If you receive a damaged, defective, or incorrect item, we will work with you to make things right.

As we are in Argentina and the shipping costs are expensive, we do not accept returns but we are more than happy to send a replacement piece instead. Please only purchase our items if you are a serious buyer.

23) Advantages of vegetable tanning

Vegetable tanning is friendly to the environment, which means that a product that can be recycled.

Vegetable tanning is an ancient tradition in Argentina and also around the World, so most of the tanneries have very skilled craftsmen who produce leather

Due to the use of natural tannins, vegetable tanning products are unique and have their own life. They are not the same throughout his life, but constantly changing to better

The colors are vegetable tanning produces rich, warm tones that look completely natural

Vegetable tanned leathers are more valuable, and therefore sell at a higher price compared to chrome tanned leathers

Disadvantages of vegetable tanning

The average time of vegetable tanning process is similar to that of chromium, but can take up to 65 days to produce sheep skin leather.

Vegetable tanned products are more expensive. It requires more skill to tan the leather, which means they are better quality

The colors that can result from vegetable tanned are limited

Once we get the leather from the tanneries we re-select them again and we start cutting the edges and parts that are not useful at our Workshop.

24) Click here to watch the VIDEO: How to assemble the Big BKF butterfly leather chair

25) Click here to watch the VIDEO: How to assemble the Big BKF Ottoman

26) Where are the first 2 original butterfly leather chairs? 

In 1938, three architects (members of an association known as Grupo Austral, one officially Catalan, Antonio Bonet Castellana, and two Argentines, Juan Kurchan and Jorge Ferrari Hardoy) presented the chair at a Buenos Aires exhibition. The design so impressed Kaufmann, then an industrial-design curator for the Museum of Modern Art, that he promptly imported one for his parents’ new weekend house, the famous Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. He imported another for the museum too. After winning the award in 1943, the American Edgar Kaufman Jr., curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), bought two chairs for $25 each. One was for the museum's permanent collection, the other for his father's home, a collector of high design, as he had a house in Neutra, another in Mies, and the other third was the famous Falling Water house of Frank Lloyd Wright, which was where the BKF came to reside.  

In 1944, BKF received the Acquisition of MOMA prize, and in 1945 was presented in the Pavilion "Jeu de Pomme" in Paris.

When Knoll acquired the U.S. production rights in 1947, a phenomenon was born. The chair’s metal base and sack seat represented a rejection of what MoMA's current design curator Juliet Kinchin calls “the hard-edged kind of machine aesthetic of modernism in the 1930s.” The Hardoy was also a rejection of good posture and formal clothing. “It’s an impossibly improper chair,” Hannah says. “Women have to have pants on to sit in it.” Young families bought it in droves. By Knoll’s estimate, more than five million copies were produced in the 1950s.

There the chair was seen by the director of the magazine Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, where he asked for it and began to produce them to sell to subscribers.  He used the name “AA chair”, although this was not economically beneficial to the original designers when compared to the production in the U.S. Soon after, the company Hans Knoll started production of the armchairs. The son of a renowned furniture maker in Germany began to produce them under the name Butterfly for the company Knoll International beginning in 1947, until the war stopped production because of a steel shortage.

In a 1954 article, George Nelson introduced the Tripolina, the chair used by the Italian officers in North Africa, more or less a folding BKF, but with a wooden frame. Thus was established the connection between the BKF and Tripolina. 

Difficult to know exactly where they are but please do not worry about that, we are crafting exactly the same model as the original, keeping the hand art work and high quality leather that was used when these 3 visionary guys launched the chair in 1938.

27) Why is it considered the Messi of the design?

The BKF is considered one of the pieces of the most prominent modernist industrial design from the last half century, and is without a doubt, the Argentine design product most known worldwide. Its impact, both in the design and pop culture, lies in its clear synthesis, achieving universal and timeless qualities. Its creators, architects Bonet, Kurchan and Ferrari Hardoy never imagined the global impact that this chair would have, to the point of becoming a “cult object .

We labeled it the Messi of design. 

28) Social impact: We are committed with our craft work and pass our know how generation to generation 

We teach artisans and then we help them on how to make their own crafts and business. We are happy about people learning the way to craft and not loose our roots and old native ways of crafting.