The Chair That Showed Up in the New York Times

By Gaurav Nanda, Bend Goods Studio, Los Angeles

We did not plan this one.

In August 2025, the New York Times published a piece on Seth Rogen's five favorite places in Los Angeles. Grand Central Market made the list. A photographer from the Times went to document the century-old food hall in downtown LA: the vendors, the energy, the particular quality of light inside one of the city's most beloved gathering spaces.

In the background of one of those photographs, clearly visible, are Stacking Lucy Dining Chairs and a Lucy Stool. White wire. Our design. Sitting in the frame of a New York Times feature without any involvement from us whatsoever.

A vendor inside Grand Central Market had bought them. They liked the chairs. They put them in their space. And then the New York Times showed up.

Why This Matters

There is a version of furniture marketing where you pay to place your product in the right context, photograph it beautifully, and tell people it belongs there. We have never done that. We have never run a paid advertisement.

What we have done is make chairs that people choose independently, repeatedly, in the kinds of spaces that matter. Eater noticed it in 2019, when they wrote about the wire chair that seemed to be everywhere in American restaurants. What they were describing was not a marketing campaign. It was a pattern of independent decisions made by chefs, restaurateurs, and designers who found the chair and chose it on its own terms.

Grand Central Market is one more data point in that pattern. A vendor in one of LA's most iconic food halls bought Lucy Chairs and Lucy Stools because they worked for the space. Not because we asked them to. Not because we offered a discount or a feature. Because the chair is the right chair for that kind of environment: visually open, durable under daily public use, stackable when the stall closes, honest in the way that wire furniture is always honest about what it is.

Grand Central Market

Grand Central Market has operated continuously in downtown Los Angeles since 1917. It is one of the oldest and most democratic food destinations in the city. A place where a Michelin-starred chef's counter sits next to a decades-old Mexican stall, where the architecture is industrial and the energy is entirely human.

It is not a designed environment in the conventional sense. Nobody hired a firm to make it look a certain way. It has accumulated its character over more than a century of daily use. The furniture that works in that context has to earn its place through the same logic: not by being decorative, but by being right.

The Stacking Lucy Chair works in Grand Central Market for the same reason it works in hotel lobbies, restaurant terraces, and museum event spaces. It is a chair with a specific structural logic that holds up across contexts. The wire geometry is present without being loud. The stacking function means it can disappear between uses. The powder-coat finish handles the kind of daily wear that a food market demands.

The Stacking Lucy Chair

The stacking version of the Lucy Chair was designed to solve a specific problem: how do you maintain the visual character of the original design while making it practical for high-turnover commercial environments?

The answer is in the geometry. The stacking Lucy preserves the wire profile and the proportional logic of the original chair while modifying the structural points that allow it to nest cleanly. Stacked, a set of Stacking Lucy Chairs reads as a single sculptural object. Deployed across a dining space, each chair reads as a considered individual piece.

That dual quality: the ability to function as furniture and as storage without losing its character in either state, is what makes it the right choice for the kinds of spaces where Grand Central Market vendors operate. Space is limited. Turnover is constant. The chair has to work at every hour of the day and stack cleanly at the end of it.

What the New York Times Photo Represents

The Seth Rogen piece was published in the Times Travel section. It was not a design story. It was not about furniture. It was about the honest, unglamorous corners of Los Angeles that a person falls in love with after nearly three decades of living here.

That context is exactly the point. The Lucy Chair did not appear in an architecture magazine or a trade publication. It appeared in a story about real places that real people use. That is the most accurate representation of what this chair actually is: not an art object, not a statement piece, not a brand exercise. A chair that belongs in the places people actually go.

We did not put it there. That is the part we are most proud of.

Image: New York Times

The Stacking Lucy Chair and Lucy Stool are available at bendgoods.com. Trade pricing and contract specifications available through the Bend Goods trade program.