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Nearly 40 years after co-designing an iconic piece of Canadian design, Michelange Panzini compares the Solair chair to an old girlfriend.

“I gave back the plans, they made the mould, I saw the chairs at motels along the Eastern Seaboard, but I had moved on,” says the Montreal architect who conceived the design, along with Fabio Fabiano, during a weekend in 1972. “It's in the past.”

But like a former flame still burning strong, the Solair is suddenly hot again.

The chair, once sold in Sears and Eaton's catalogues, is now available for about $120 at such hip design destinations as INabstracto, EyeSpy and Smash in Toronto, where it is available in punchy shades of orange, aqua, magenta and yellow.

“We didn't know the term minimalist at the time – but it uses minimal materials in fun colours while being comfortable and stackable,” says Panzini, now 66. “Good design is not meant to look designed; it's meant to be useful.”

Canadian contemporary design expert Rachel Gotlieb calls the chair “a great translation of the traditional woven basket chair into plastic.

“While it may seem generic and commonplace,” she writes in an e-mail, “it's a great example of how simplicity in design wins out.”

The Solair owes its comeback to Paul Bourassa, curator of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. In November, 2007, he mounted an exhibition titled Quebec in Design at the University of Quebec at Montreal. This week, the show arrives at the Design Exchange in Toronto (via the Belgian city of Ghent).

“I think the timing is good, and in a Quebec context, it's important to show that there were international designers working here in 1960s because of the Expo,” says Bourassa, who acquired a chair for the museum in 2005.

First produced by Industries Provinciales Ltée in Saint-Damien in Quebec, the Solair was long believed to be out of production. A message board on the Canadian Design Resource website continues to accumulate queries about where to find the slatted plastic shell that snaps onto a foldable steel frame.

The design had simply switched owners in 1991, to housewares firm Industries Emile Lachance Ltée, which continued to produce small numbers. Sales director Charles Ouellet says he decided to ramp up production last fall after discovering many online devotees.

Retailer Kate Eisen of INabstracto and art dealer Duncan Farnan had also noticed the interest and approached Ouellet to help distribute the chair.

“We didn't want to treat it just as a motel chair because it's more than that,” says Farnan, who hosted a recent gathering to toast the Solair at Toronto's Gladstone Hotel.

Ouellet won't reveal how many chairs have sold so far this year, but he confirms that it's more than last year. “I think the Solair chair reminds a lot of Canadians and Americans how strong we were in design and manufacturing three decades ago,” he writes by e-mail.

No surprise that Panzini jokes about regretting to ask for royalties. Surprisingly, he doesn't even own an original. “Everyone asks,” he says.

Fabiano, meanwhile, suffers from Alzheimer's. His daughter Claudia, 29, says he was touched to see the chair included in Bourassa's exhibition. Her first memory of the chair dates to the mid-eighties on a family vacation and was reminded of it only when contacted by the museum.

“I think what's really amazing is, at the time, they had no idea that it would become a classic piece that's still relevant so many years later,” she says from Washington, D.C. “Out of everything he designed, this was probably the most fun. … It's the one thing he designed that I would really want in my house. It represents youth.”

Quebec in Design; 75 years

of works from the collection

of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec runs from June 30 to Oct. 4, www.dx.org.