State Academic Ballet & Opera House

The Ekaterinburg Opera and Ballet Theatre is one of the oldest opera houses in Russia that back in 2012 celebrated 100 years of activity: it was inaugurated in 1912 with an opera by Mikhail Glinka for the Tzar Nicholas II. With the occasion of this celebration, the city of Ekaterinburg decided to refurbish the building and substitute the existing chairs. Our TRAVIATA selected for this project – a chair of classic look with an structure fully made of solid wood with several characteristics that made it perfect. First of all the TRAVIATA model has a classic look that remembers the XIX furniture; predominance of wood both in the standards and back. Secondly, this model offers a distinctive feature: its flexibility that enables to modify all different parts.

Due to the fact this building is a Russian historic building, no structural modifications were allowed – and of course not a single chair could be lost either. Subsequently our company had to propose the same TRAVIATA chair in different configurations and sizes for every area of the theatre: Stalls, Boxes, Dress Circle and Upper Circle. In order to optimize the visibility we opted for manufacturing backs with two heights and four inclinations depending on the location of the theater where the chair would be fixed (the higher, the more upright the back would be). Similarly we produced also two different types of chairs in terms of structure: individual with two arms per chair for the best seats of the Stalls (those close to the stage) and regular with shared arm for the other sections. Apart from this we produced chairs with six different seat centres dimensions to align our chairs to the side corridors while being accommodated to staggered distribution.

Finally, this theatre also had an additional challenge: three different fixing types that added more combinations to the already mentioned options. So, the floor of the Stalls was sloped, flat for the Dress Circles and special for the Upper Circle since chairs had to be fixed directly onto the tiers without legs.