In 1898 Charles Rennie Mackintosh and George Walton were commissioned by Miss Cranston to extend and redecorate her Tea Rooms at 114 Argyle Street. Mackintosh was responsible for the fittings and furniture, of which these two chairs are an important example.

The present chairs differ from the abstract and elongated forms for which Mackintosh is often known, but are characteristic in their design and construction of his work for the Miss Cranston's Argyle Street Tea Rooms. All Mackintosh's furniture for the Tea Rooms was constructed from dark-stained oak, and almost all the chairs were supplied with rush seating. Few however have survived with their original rush seating, and for that reason the present chairs are all the more important a survival. The structure and solidity of Mackintosh's oak furniture is at least in part to thank for its survival, and his stylised use of organic motifs if as clear here and elsewhere in his oeuvre. A hallmark of Mackintosh's style, the arms pierced with crescent forms are designed to present stylised birds. Though almost a quarter-century earlier, perhaps they hold the kernel of abstraction which later led to Brancusi's Bird in Space.

The present chairs are the rarer of two variants which Mackintosh designed for the Tea Rooms, the other having two splats, an example of which is currently in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago (2000.464). Of the surviving chairs, the present appear to be the only surviving pair with three splats, possibly commissioned alongside the two-plat variant, or perhaps a later replacement. When the Tea Rooms closed in 1920, some of the remaining furniture was removed to the Ingram Street Tea Rooms, though most was sold to the Tea Rooms' customers, and although not yet established, it is probable that the present chairs shared a similar early history.