A thousand pounds on four slender legs: Foster + Partners at Emeco

Norman Foster's studio arrived in Hanover with something close to an engineering dare: a chair light enough to move with one hand and strong enough to be trusted anywhere. The answer was 20-06, tested to hold 1,000 lb and covered by a lifetime warranty that follows it outdoors as well as in. It reads as slender because it is; it survives because of what the factory does to the aluminium long before anyone sits down.

That is the working method across the whole catalogue. An outside studio brings the idea — Starck, Morrison, Grcic, Barber and Osgerby, Fukasawa — and the Pennsylvania factory decides whether the idea can be built to survive decades of public use. La Mercanti specifies the range for projects across the UK and beyond, from staff canteens to hotel terraces, and carries the import, the paperwork and the site delivery as a single job.