Danish-style Comfortable Interior Design

His father agreed. Carl Hansen had founded the company in 1908, started with bedroom furniture for the bourgeoisie on Funen island, survived the Depression by making wooden cases for Singer sewing machines. The old man knew what sold. These curved things Hans Wegner had brought in were not it.

But Ella Hansen liked them.

This was 1949. Wegner had delivered four chairs and a sideboard to the Hansen workshop in Odense. He had been working on Chinese-inspired designs since 1944, studying portraits of Danish merchants sitting in Ming dynasty chairs, trying to figure out what made those old seats work. The Y-shaped back support came from that. The steam-bent wood that curved the armrest into the backrest as a single piece. The paper cord seat woven in an envelope pattern.

Holger could not manufacture them. Not properly. The back legs needed a subcontractor with a lathe. The steam bending required an outside factory. Everything about the design exceeded what his shop could do alone.

He put them into production anyway.

The chairs launched in 1950. Design magazines wrote favorable reviews. Nobody bought them.

Holger flew to America with his last savings. New York to San Francisco. He showed the Wishbone Chair to anyone who would look. The orders started coming.

China has at least five factories copying the Wishbone Chair. Knud Erik mentions this without much concern. The copies do not come close to the original quality.

The original takes three weeks to make. Over 100 steps. Most done by hand.

A craftsman spends an hour weaving each seat. 120 meters of paper cord, fed through in an envelope pattern, the tension maintained by hand. The cord compresses over years of use. It molds to the shape of whoever sits there most. The seat in a grandmother's chair looks different from the seat in a child's.

The hall where they do the weaving is quiet. No machines. Just people with cord.

The wood comes from sawmills that have supplied the factory since the 1950s. Oak from the EU. Beech from Denmark. Walnut from America. Only the inner part of the trunk gets used. Everything is FSC-certified.

Scrap becomes fuel. A district heating plant burns the leftover wood. It warms 400 homes in Gelsted.

Holger Hansen worked constantly through the 1950s. The American orders kept coming. He partnered with Wegner for fifteen years. The Wishbone accounted for more than half of the company's sales.

In 1962, Holger died at home. He was fifty.

Ella stepped in. No succession plan existed. She ran the company and oversaw the development of new designs. Wegner created the Shell Chair during her tenure. Another bestseller.

The 1970s and 1980s were difficult. A failed exclusivity deal ended the American business temporarily. Danish modern went out of fashion. The workshop survived but did not thrive.

Then Japanese collectors started buying.

The CH25 lounge chair uses 400 meters of paper cord. The weaving takes ten hours.

Wegner chose the material during World War II. Seagrass had become unavailable. Paper cord was a replacement. He liked the look. He liked that it did not stretch. He put it on everything.

Arne Jacobsen got the SAS Royal Hotel commission in 1956. First skyscraper in Denmark. He designed everything. The building. The furniture. The lighting. The signage. The cutlery. The door handles.

The exterior was glass and steel. The interior was supposed to contrast. He wanted something soft inside the hard box.

He went home to his garage. He worked with clay. He shaped curves until they felt right against his own back.

The Egg Chair came from that. Fritz Hansen manufactured fifty units for the hotel lobby. The foam shell technique was new. No visible frame. Just upholstery over padding over foam. The chairs weighed seven kilograms. Staff could move them easily.

The hotel opened in 1960. New owners took over in the early 1980s and threw out most of the original furniture. Some pieces ended up in flea markets. Only room 606 stayed untouched.

Space Copenhagen renovated the hotel in 2018. The Egg Chairs came back.

Fritz Hansen still makes them. No more than ten per week. Over 1,100 hand stitches for leather. 500 for fabric.

Meik Wiking runs the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen. He wrote a book called The Little Book of Hygge. It sold two million copies. Oxford added hygge to the dictionary.

Wiking calls candles "instant hygge." The Danish term is levende lys. Living light.

Hygge describes a feeling. The word cannot be precisely translated. It involves candles and blankets and old friends and hot drinks and staying at the table long after the meal ends. It involves furniture that you want to sit in for hours.

The Wishbone Chair costs over a thousand dollars new. The Egg Chair costs several times that.

The price reflects three weeks of work. Or ten hours of weaving. Or 100 steps done mostly by hand. Or sawmills that have supplied the same factory since the 1950s.

The price also reflects something else. A bet that people will keep these objects for decades. That grandchildren will sit where grandparents sat. That the paper cord will compress into the shape of the family.