So accomplished were the first Modernist cantilevered chairs designed by Mart Stam, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer, that it became difficult for others to design cantilevered chairs that seemed anything other than either pale imitations or outlandish attempts at novelty. Yet Hans Luckhardt's design, which approached the borders of novelty, went beyond even Mies van der Rohe's in its rejection of anything like right-angles. Like other cantilevered chairs, it relied on the tensile strength of extruded steel tube to achieve its minimal structure. However, it made use not only of a cantilevered frame (like previous designs), but also of a cantilevered seat of extraordinarily thin plywood, which seemed to float in the middle of the frame despite being attached at two points by steel flanges. The chair proclaimed itself as a triumph of industrial materials and contemporary design over the laws of nature.

DESTA (Deutsche Stahlrohrmobel), founded by Anton Lorenz, manufactured a single model of chair from 1930. Although credited in contemporary magazines, manufacturers' catalogues and later accounts to the brothers Hans and Wassili (1889-1972) Luckhardt, and also sometimes to their architectural partner Alfons Anker, the furniture designs were apparently exclusively the work of the younger Luckhardt, Hans. DESTA was formally liquidated in 1933, though it may have stopped trading in 1932. The Luckhardt brothers were at the cutting edge of German architectural practice after the First World War. As members of the Novembergruppe, the Arbeitsrat für Kunst, Der Ring and Die Gläserne Kette, they worked in an Expressionist mode until around 1924 when, after they set up in practice with Anker (1872-1958), they generally embraced the rectilinear geometry of the leading architects of the period, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius.