Quote - This is going to be poly heavy Lux! What's the story then, are you extruding spines?

Oh yeah, this will be a little heavy on the poly side, but not as bad as you might think.  I'll be posting more screencaps later of the step by step, but the process here is just as you expected; splines.  I started by shaping  the chair from a surface using patch topology in 3DSmax (because patches are very easy to get perfectly smooth curved surfaces, kinda like Nurbs surfaces), then converted the result to quad polygons.  Then, in edge mode, I extracted splines from the edge loops of that poly surface, which gave me a series of splines in the exact shape of my S chair.  The hard part, so to speak, is now creating a weave by pulling the vertices of the "vertical" splines above and beneath the horizontal supports.  I tried writing a Maxscript to do it automatically for me, but my scripting skills aren't yet at the level where I could make it happen.

I don't need to actually extrude the splines, since that part is automated in 3dsMax,  simply by selecting "renderable" splines, as you see here.  The resulting geometry of renderable splines is quad based, and visible in the viewport, while still allowing me to manipulate the underlying spline itself at the vertex or segment level, with instant feedback of the geometry changes.  Once I'm done shaping the weave here, I'll simply convert them to mesh geometry, and they will be like any other polygon manifold.  At this early stage, I still have parametric control over the density of the spline meshes (to make the tubes smoother or blockier if need be), or I could create rectangular "strips".  There's a lot of options while they are still linked to the underlying splines, and I'm not dead set on exactly what I'll do in the end.  At this geometric resolution, the object will end up somewhere in the 150k quad range I'm guessing, but I may add even MORE detail if I decide to make them bamboo-like (such as insetting "ribs" at each ring edge along the length of the tubes to simulate how bamboo reeds look).  Plus I'll remove the caps at the ends of the tubes, which at this time are simply Ngons, and make them Quad caps before exporting.  That part is easy and automated, but adds to the poly count of course.

I modeled a weaved Easter Basket a couple months ago (render in my gallery), which used a totally different process, but the result was excellent.  This particular approach was advised to me by a classmate,  as he said the control over the splines is far better than the technique I used for the basket, so I'm giving this way a try.  So far, so good I think.  More screencaps to come.

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