Oxford High Back Swivel Lounge Chair by Fritz Hansen

Characterized by clean lines and an application of ergonomics, the Oxford chairs in the banquet hall at Oxford University’s St. Catherine’s College suggest style and prestige, and the professors who sit in them wouldn’t have it any other way.

Celebrated Danish architect Arne Jacobsen (1902–71) created the graceful high-backed chair as part of his 1960 architectural commission to design the campus. Not unlike the work he had just completed at the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, Jacobsen’s modernist vision for what became the esteemed institution on England’s River Cherwell was all-encompassing: He created clocks, flatware and all of the furnishings for the school. In the dining hall, the students would be seated in his low, lightweight 1955 Series 7 chairs, while their teachers relaxed in the regal Oxford chairs.

Jacobsen excelled at product and furniture design, achievements that owe to his careful attention to every detail of his architectural work. A one-time bricklayer who became a leading figure in a field largely dominated by former cabinetmakers, the Copenhagen native is widely known for his sophisticated chairs. 

While he was still an architecture student in 1925 at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Jacobsen won an award for a chair he designed at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris. Later, in 1952, following years of executing successful architectural projects out of his own practice, Jacobsen designed his revered Ant chair, a slim and stackable piece for the employee cafeteria of a pharmaceutical company. The Ant is a modernist marvel — its one-piece plywood seat and backrest derived from the work that American designers Charles and Ray Eames had advanced in their plywood furniture making. Jacobsen’s improvements on the Ant yielded the curvy Series 7, which he utilized in his commission at St. Catherine’s College.

Made of molded sliced veneer, the fully upholstered shell of the Oxford chair produced for St. Catherine’s College was specifically crafted with a high back to offer privacy for professors as they dined at the banquet hall’s long tables. The chair was intended to symbolize the faculty’s authority over the student body. St. Catherine’s was still under construction when it officially opened in 1962, as Jacobsen didn’t complete the project until the following year. Fritz Hansen introduced the Oxford chair in 1965. In addition to the towering professorial original, it is now available in low- or medium-height versions, privacy and authority be damned.

When the Copenhagen-based furniture maker Fritz Hansen opened for business more than 140 years ago, the company — which today styles itself The Republic of Fritz Hansen — adhered to the traditional, time-honored Danish values of craftsmanship in woodworking and joinery. Yet thanks to the postwar innovations of Arne Jacobsen and others, Fritz Hansen would become the country’s leader in Scandinavian modern design using new, forward-looking materials and methods.

Fritz Hansen started his company in 1872, specializing in the manufacture of small furniture parts. In 1915, the firm became the first in Denmark to make chairs using steam-bent wood (a technique most familiar from birch used in the ubiquitous café chairs by Austrian maker Thonet). At the time, Fritz Hansen was best known for seating that featured curved legs and curlicue splats and referenced 18th-century Chippendale designs.

In the next few decades, the company promoted simple, plain chairs with slatted backs and cane or rush seats designed by such proto-modernist masters as Kaare Klint and Søren Hansen. Still, the most aesthetically striking piece Fritz Hansen produced in the first half of the 20th century was arguably the China chair of 1944 by Hans Wegner — and that piece, with its yoke-shaped bentwood back- and armrest, was based on seating manufactured in China during the Ming dynasty. (Wegner was moved by portraits he’d seen of Danish merchants in the Chinese chairs.) 

Everything changed in 1952 with Arne Jacobsen’s Ant chair. The collaboration between the architect and Fritz Hansen officially originated in 1934 — that year, Jacobsen created his inaugural piece for the manufacturer, the solid beechwood Bellevue chair for a restaurant commission. The Ant chair, however, was the breakthrough.

With assistance from his then-apprentice Verner Panton, Jacobsen designed the Ant chair for the cafeteria of a Danish healthcare company called Novo Nordisk. The chair was composed of a seat and backrest formed from a single piece of molded plywood attached, in its original iteration, to three tubular metal legs. Its silhouette suggests the shape of the insect’s body, and the lightweight, stackable chair and its biomorphic form became an international hit.

Jacobsen followed with more plywood successes, such as the Grand Prix chair of 1957. The following year he designed the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen and its furnishings, including the Egg chair and the Swan chair. Those two upholstered pieces, with their lush, organic frames made of fiberglass-reinforced polyurethane, have become the two chairs most emblematic of mid-20th-century cool. Moreover, the Egg and Swan led Fritz Hansen to fully embrace new man-made materials, like foam, plastic and steel wire used to realize the avant-garde creations of later generations of designers with whom the firm collaborated, such as Piet Hein, Jørn Utzon (the architect of the Sydney Opera House) and Verner Panton. If the Fritz Hansen of 1872 would not now recognize his company, today’s connoisseurs certainly do.

Find a collection of vintage Fritz Hansen tables, lounge chairs, sofas and other furniture on 1stDibs.