Design Within Reach sponsors a fun design contest every year. The public is invited to design and build a chair using only the corks, foils, and labels of two champagne bottles. The sponsor this year was Veuve-Cliquot Champagne, and the majority of the chairs produced shows nice flashes of color from the yellow labels. The winners and runner-ups have been announced and will be making a tour of sixteen US cities this spring. I was also able to find a link for the runners up of the coveted "Most Popular" award.

This year there were over one thousand entries coming from several nations. The breadth of ingenuity is staggering with some truly innovative methods used to bend the raw materials into a usable and potentially comfortable shape. I wish DWR would place all 1,000 entries on the web (but that's mainly because I sent in an entry this year). It's no secret that I find design contests fascinating, so be like me and spend the rest of your unproductive Friday reading up on the previous Champagne Chair winners.

DWR's website is kind of terrible for older news, but I found a link for the winners and runner ups of the 2004 contest. 2004 was the last year that DWR allowed the actual glass bottle to be used as a material for building the chair so there's a bit of engineering disparity between the different annual entries. Here is page one of the 2004 runner-ups, and here's the link to page two. Sadly, it appears that the 2003 and 2005 results have been taken off the website.