Chinese Chair by Hans J. Wegner for Fritz Hansen, 1943

When he designed the first edition of his modest Chinese chair — or China chair — Denmark native Hans Wegner (1914–2007) had been reportedly moved by portraits he’d seen of Danish businessmen relaxing in traditional round-backed Ming dynasty–era chairs. While the legendary furniture maker’s tribute to East Asian seating — a minimal cherrywood chair with a curved bentwood back support and removable leather seat cushion — called on Oriental forms that preceded him by hundreds of years, it merged the old with the new and was uniquely of its time.

In blending East Asian aesthetics and Scandinavian modernism, Wegner defined an approach that would underscore the sculptural and functional chairs he created in the years that followed. A dedication to craftsmanship, respect for natural materials and fussiness for details owe to his apprenticeship with master cabinetmaker H.F. Stahlberg. After his apprenticeship, Wegner studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and collaborated with designers Arne Jacobsen and Erik Møller on furniture for Aarhus City Hall in 1938. Wegner established his own drafting studio in 1943 and designed the Chinese chair in 1944.

In its pared-down simplicity and reliance on soft organic shapes, the Chinese chair design yielded multiple prototypes, and so a collection of chairs inspired by Oriental craftsmanship followed — a line that includes Wegner’s celebrated Round chair as well as the Wishbone. It is currently produced by both Fritz Hansen and PP Møbler. Although Wegner designed nearly 500 chairs during his career, the Chinese chair is a cornerstone of his legacy — a legacy that continues to influence countless furniture makers today.

Best known for his chairs and other seating pieces — though a master of many furniture types like sofas and tables — Hans Wegner was a prolific designer whose elegant, often ebullient, forms and devotion to the finest methods in joinery made "Danish Modern" a popular byword for stylish, well-made furniture in the mid-20th century.

Wegner considered himself a carpenter first and a furniture designer second. Like his peers Arne Jacobsen and Finn Juhl, Wegner believed that striking aesthetics in furniture were based on a foundation of practicality: a chair must be comfortable and sturdy before it is chic.

In keeping with that tenet, several of Hans Wegner’s best chair designs have their roots in traditional seating forms. The Peacock chair (designed in 1947) is a throne-like adaptation of the Windsor chair; pieces from the China chair series (begun in 1944) as well as the 1949 Wishbone chair, with its distinctive Y-shaped back splat, are derived from 17th-century Ming seating pieces, as is the upholstered Ox chair (1960). Wegner’s comfy Papa Bear chair (1951) is an almost surreally re-scaled English wingback chair.

Wegner’s most representative piece, the Round chair (1949), gained a footnote in political history when it was used on the TV stage of the first Kennedy-Nixon debate of 1960. That chair, along with Wegner’s more bravura designs — for example, the 1963 Shell chair, with its curved surfboard-shaped seat — bring a quietly sculptural presence to a room.

Wegner was a designer who revered his primary material — wood — and it shows. His wood gathers patina and character with age; every Hans Wegner piece testifies to the life it has led.

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