Bringing the retro boom into to the wheelchair market, the fabulous KPII is a brand new wheelchair with its roots very much in the past. Hailed as the first ever vintage wheelchair, the KPII is inspired by, and based on, the model used by King Philip of Spain, the man generally considered to have been the first person in Europe to popularise the wheelchair.
The designers looked at the twenty first century, metallic, chrome looking wheelchairs and decided to create something completely different. Ditching modern materials and using birch wood as a basis for the model, they added old fashioned wheels with rudimentary mechanisms, to make a wheelchair that feels like something a sixteenth century king may have used.
This is a design with a true royal heritage that looks to recreate the device used by the man who is best known in these parts for his failed Armada. Despite his naval troubles, Philip was known, on the continent, for his style and grace, as well as introducing the lispish quality into the Spanish language. Philip II required a wheelchair due to chronic gout and used a decadent and elaborate rolling chair with movable arm and leg rests. Now you can be just like him and use the same wheelchair model he once used.
In 2014, one design team have replicated King Philip’s wheelchair by building a limited number of old fashioned wheelchairs which go on general sale today. With bespoke, posh woodwork and irregularly sized, hand crafted wheels, these fifty chairs are extremely exclusive and each one can be said to be a genuine one of a kind.
The design of the KPII is strikingly different to most modern wheelchairs and many will say that there’s a good reason for that. The ornate, vintage design may restrict manoeuvrability and even make independent use impossible. Certainly, you’d have to have abnormally long arms to self propel and even then the wheels fall off too regularly for many to enjoy. And there are not breaks to speak of – “a king stops for no man”. But these a vintage-style pieces and the KPII provides something that money can’t buy – a chance to say you’re just like a member of one of the great early modern royal houses.
April Foster and Jools Day, the design team behind the KPII, say that they looked around at all the retro products and thought why isn’t there a vintage-style wheelchair too? The pair looked into the history of wheelchairs and found, in King Philip II, a genuine icon of style and disability. “Modern day wheelchair users may be role models for their successes in life – whether that be in sports, science or anything else – we’ve even had presidents in wheelchairs,” they say, “but none of them were born into power like Philip the Second”. When we asked what they’re getting at with that comment they seemed a little unsure.
But what is for sure is that they’ve created a distinct wheelchair with an antique aesthetic and none of the usual amenities of contemporary chairs. It might be uncomfortable, it might be near impossible to control and it might regularly breakdown, but since when was fashion ever easy? This new KPII, a design with its wheels very firmly in the past, could be the future or wheelchair fashion.
Cool, wonder if it’ll be at NAIDEX? 😛