Italian Midcentury Swivel Armchair Cone Chair by Verner Panton for Vitra, 1958

Simple geometric shapes don’t often cause seismic shifts in furniture design. The bold Cone chair, conceived by mid-century Danish architect and designer Verner Panton (1926–98), however, brought about just such a transformation.

After graduating from Copenhagen’s Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1951, Panton secured a mentorship in the office of renowned architect Arne Jacobsen. There, he contributed to the development of Jacobsen’s revolutionary Ant chair. Slender, lightweight and stackable, with a one-piece laminated-veneer seat that rested on three plastic legs, the 1952 design mirrored the elegant form of its insect namesake. The Ant chair had a significant effect on Panton, who went on to explore the possibilities of Plexiglas and synthetics, rather than working in the solid teak and oak that occupied his contemporaries.

The influence of Jacobsen’s work is evident in Panton’s Cone chair, which he debuted at his father’s restaurant in southern Denmark in 1958, six years after leaving the architect’s office. The designer was revamping the eatery, and the chair — with its artful, pod-like shell set upon a stainless-steel swivel base and its comfortable seat upholstered in soft red fabric to comfort hungry diners — was a key element in his (typically radiant) overhauled interiors.

Panton’s renovation dazzled reporters and patrons, including entrepreneur Percy von Halling-Koch, who created a company to produce the Cone chair. Its unusual form — an inverted cone seeming to balance on its point — caused a sensation in Denmark and beyond. Displayed in a Manhattan store window, the chair incited such a furor on the city’s crowded streets that the police had the shop owners remove it from public view.

Today, Verner Panton's Cone chair is manufactured by Swiss furniture company Vitra and continues to delight design connoisseurs.

Verner Panton introduced the word “groovy” — or at least its Danish equivalent — into the Scandinavian modern design lexicon. He developed fantastical, futuristic forms and embraced bright colors and new materials such as plastic, fabric-covered polyurethane foam and steel-wire framing for the creation of his chairs, sofas, floor lamps and other furnishings. And Panton’s ebullient Pop art sensibility made him an international design star of the 1960s and ’70s. This radical departure from classic Danish modernism, however, actually stemmed from his training under the greats of that design style.

Born on the largely rural Danish island of Funen, Panton studied architecture and engineering at Copenhagen’s Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, where the lighting designer Poul Henningsen was one of his teachers. After graduating, in 1951, Panton worked in the architectural office of Arne Jacobsen, and he became a close friend of Hans Wegner's.

Henningsen taught a scientific approach to design; Jacobsen was forever researching new materials; and Wegner, the leader in modern furniture design using traditional woodworking and joinery, encouraged experimental form.

Panton opened his own design office in 1955, issuing tubular steel chairs with woven seating. His iconoclastic aesthetic was announced with his 1958 Cone chair, modified a year later as the Heart Cone chair. Made of upholstered sheet metal and with a conical base in place of legs, the design shocked visitors to a furniture trade show in Copenhagen. 

Panton went on to successive bravura technical feats. His curving, stackable Panton chair, his most popular design, was the first chair to be made from a single piece of molded plastic.

Panton had been experimenting with ideas for chairs made of a single material since the late 1950s. He debuted his plastic seat for the public in the design magazine Mobilia in 1967 and then at the 1968 Cologne Furniture Fair. The designer’s S-Chair models 275 and 276, manufactured during the mid-1960s by August Sommer and distributed by the bentwood specialists at Gebrüder Thonet, were the first legless chairs crafted from a single piece of plywood.

Panton would spend the latter half of the 1960s and early ’70s developing all-encompassing room environments composed of sinuous and fluid-formed modular seating made of foam and metal wire. He also created a series of remarkable lighting designs, most notably his Fun chandeliers — introduced in 1964 and composed of scores of shimmering capiz-shell disks — and the Space Age VP Globe pendant light of 1969.

Panton’s designs are made to stand out and put an eye-catching exclamation point on even the most modern decor.

Find vintage Verner Panton chairs, magazine racks, rugs, table lamps and other furniture on 1stDibs.