Vienna Secession full 'Fledermaus' set, executed by J. & J. Kohn, Austria

A full set of 'Fledermaus' furniture after the design of Josef Hoffmann, executed by Jacob & Josef Kohn, Vienna. The set consists of a table, a bench, and 4 chairs (2 with larger arms, two with the small arms.

These wonderful Vienna Secession seating and table designs began life in the half-light of Vienna’s early 1900s avant-garde nightlife.

The (originally white painted) Fledermaus furniture was designed by Josef Hoffmann for the legendary Cabaret Fledermaus, opened in Vienna in 1907 in the basement of a building at Kärntner Straße 33. Not your regular nightclub, but a complete Wiener Werkstätte world: architecture, furniture, theatre, shadow plays, dance, music, graphics and literature, all gathered into one charged little underground universe.

The name Fledermaus, or “bat”, was part reference to Strauss, part emblem for a cabaret devoted to the hidden, experimental and unexpected. Visitors entered a basement of theatrical intensity, with hundreds of coloured majolica tiles by Wiener Keramik artists including Bertold Löffler and Michael Powolny, set against a sharp black-and-white tiled floor.

Klimt visited. The Wiesenthal Sisters danced. Writers, painters, performers and designers moved through.

The furniture became one of the cabaret’s lasting icons. Jacob & Josef Kohn, one of the great Viennese bentwood producers of the period, made all kinds of different versions.

Although the Cabaret Fledermaus itself was short-lived, its interior became legendary. Financial pressures forced the Wiener Werkstätte and Fritz Waerndorfer to withdraw in 1909. But the furniture design survived as one of the most recognisable expressions of early Viennese modernism.