Although many architects and furniture designers of the Bauhaus era were intent on providing well-designed homes and impeccably manufactured furnishings for common people, the Barcelona chair was an exception.

It was designed for Spanish royalty to oversee the opening ceremonies of the exhibition and was described by Time magazine as inhabiting a "sumptuous German pavilion.

The chairs are almost completely hand-crafted,[5] and each carries a facsimile of van der Rohe's signature, stamped into its frame.

[citation needed] Unlicensed replicas of the original design are made by other manufacturers worldwide and are sold under different marketing names.

[6][citation needed] In his 1981 book about modern architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House, Tom Wolfe called the Barcelona chair as "the Platonic ideal of the chair", and wrote that, despite its high price, owning one had become a necessity for young architects: "When you saw the holy object on the sisal rug, you knew you were in a household where a fledgling architect and his young wife had sacrificed everything to bring the symbol of the godly mission into their home.