Gray Folding Chair

Snow Peak was founded in 1958 in Sanjo, Niigata — Japan's 600-year knife-making capital — by alpinist and metalworker Yukio Yamai, who was frustrated with the European mountaineering gear of his day and started hand-forging his own crampons and pitons in titanium and inox steel. He registered the Snow Peak name in 1963 as a tribute to Mt. Tanigawa, the Niigata peak with the highest fatality record in the world. The family has run the company ever since: Tohru Yamai pivoted to car-camping in the 1980s, and third-generation Lisa Yamai launched the apparel line in 2014. Guiding philosophy: noasobi — the art of playing in the field. Every product is still tested at Snow Peak's 41-acre campfield-HQ in Niigata, across the road from a Kengo Kuma-designed Field Suite Spa.

Snow Peak's seating — folding chairs, cushions, bamboo benches — applies Japanese furniture restraint to camp use. Steel frames, breathable fabrics, hand-shaped bamboo, and silhouettes that sit as well at a campfield as on a balcony or studio floor. Built for decades of use, packable, and very much designed to be seen.