Sebel Furniture is today the pre-eminent player in the Australian commercial furniture market. Sebel specialises in the manufacture and design, distribution and marketing of a wide range of products for the education, hospitality, stadium, healthcare and more recently the corporate markets.

Establishing in 1947, Sebel Furniture still operates from its original site at Bankstown, NSW. In 1951 Sebel began production of Mobo toys and a new furniture range based around the innovative Stak-a-Bye chair. In the late 1960s the decision was made to drop the toy side of the business and concentrate entirely on the furniture range which had taken the market by storm. Today, Sebel is part of a major Australian manufacturing group - GWA International.

Sebel Postura Ergonomic students chair and desk	Sebel chairs

The man behind the Sebel name and its famous stackable chairs - Harry Sebel - is recognised as the Australian pioneer of moulded plastic furniture. Born in October 1915 at Westcliff-on-Sea in south-eastern England, to Bessie and David, a wheelwright who had emigrated from Russia in 1910, Sebel learned early in life how to make things, and was obsessed with Meccano. "I remember creating an entire grandfather clock, including pendulum from it. Although it went three times faster than it should have, it still worked. But my design career started at fifteen when I began work in my father’s factory. He was a wheelwright at the time but it wasn’t long before he realised horse and carts where going out of fashion. So about eighteen months after I started he purchased a wrought iron business. Working there taught me about all the things that can go wrong in factories, and all the things that should be done better. It’s where my manufacturing mindset began."

Sebel and a branch of the family business migrated to Australia just before the beginning of World War II. The business focused initially on manufacturing toys. "In 1946 when the war ended one of our sales people asked us to make some tables and chairs because there was such a great need for them. Of course my father agreed and instantly wanted to know how many chairs he could fit on a lorry. It seemed like something of great importance to him.

Sebel adhered to his father's dictum that simplicity was the secret of success. "Complicated solutions to any problem are fairly easy to come by, but it takes genius plus a fair amount of perspiration to arrive at a simple solution," he said. So the first chairs were designed to fit neatly into each other when stacked - the Stak-a-Bye chairs. "It was much more economical and ultimately we sold millions of them. It’s what allowed me to begin the Australian factory."

Amongst the many projects and products he involved himself in during his lifetime, Sebel also conceived and developed the Sebel Town House hotel complex in Elizabeth Bay, Sydney in 1963 after planning regulations forced him to abandon plans for a block of bachelor flats at the site. Sebel created this lair to court and lure international rockstars, pop queens, the rich, the famous, hangers-on and want-a-bes in town. A place to loose one’s self, part with a little money, and potentially be immortalised in black & white on the bar’s dimly lit walls. Like many institutions in Sydney the famed Sebel of Elizabeth Bay has become appartments.

The Town House was sold in 1981, and in 1982 Sebel sold out of the furniture business that still bears his name. A brief retirement was followed by the launch of another plastic moulding business, specialising in "unbreakable" crockery. Sebel passed away on 18th September 2008, age 92.



Hillsong Church, Castle Hill, NSW