Hans Wegner: From Cabinetmaking to the Chair

Hans Wegner: From Cabinetmaking to the Chair

Few designers have been so completely identified with a single object. Hans J. Wegner (1914-2007) designed tables, desks, benches and beds, but it was to the chair that he devoted most of his life and his understanding of materials. He is credited with several hundred models, a few of which have become classics of twentieth-century Danish design. What sets him apart is a constant requirement: form should come from function, from the wood and from the way it is joined, not from added decoration.

From the cabinetmaker's bench to drawing

Wegner was born in Tønder, in southern Jutland, and entered an apprenticeship with a master cabinetmaker at a very young age. This craft training, predating any design study, would remain the key to reading his work. He knew wood from the inside: its tensions, its constraints, the way a steam-bent fibre wants to return to its original position. He later completed his training in Copenhagen and worked for a time in Arne Jacobsen's architecture office before setting up on his own at the end of the 1940s.

This double culture, the workbench and the drawing board, goes a long way to explaining why his chairs last. Wegner did not conceive a silhouette and then have it executed by others; he thought simultaneously about the joint, the tenon, the bend, the stretched cord. The technical detail is never hidden: it becomes the motif.

The Wishbone, the first chair for Carl Hansen & Søn

Wegner's most widely produced model is the CH24 chair, known as the Wishbone or Y-chair for the shape of its backrest. Designed in 1949, it is the first chair he created for the manufacturer Carl Hansen & Søn, which has produced it without interruption since 1950. Wegner combined the backrest and armrests into a single continuous steam-bent piece, and added the central Y-shaped support that gives the whole its stability and the model its name.

The seat is hand-woven in paper cord, a job that takes a skilled craftsman about an hour and several dozen metres of cord. This stretched, unpadded seat sums up Wegner's approach: lighten, structure, let the material do the work. The CH24 is still produced by Carl Hansen & Søn in several woods and finishes, and it is this maker that serves as the reference for authenticating a piece.

The Round Chair, "the Chair"

If the Wishbone is the most widespread, the Round Chair of 1949 is probably the most famous. Known in the English-speaking world simply as "the Chair", it earned that nickname after appearing in the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon television debate, where both candidates were seated in it. It is admired for the line of its curved backrest and for the cabinetmaker's joint that brings together the pieces of the upper arc.

This chair was first produced by the joiner Johannes Hansen, the workshop partner with whom Wegner developed many of his prototypes. Since 1990, Johannes Hansen's expertise has been taken over by the manufacturer PP Møbler, which today produces the Round Chair and several other major pieces by the designer. On the vintage market, the origin of manufacture (Johannes Hansen for the older examples, PP Møbler for the more recent ones) is one of the things to verify.

The work with Fritz Hansen

Wegner collaborated with several Danish manufacturers over his career, among them Fritz Hansen. It was notably with this house that some of his research into laminated wood and stackable seating was produced, in a period when Danish industry sought to reconcile cabinetmaking quality with series production. This plurality of manufacturers is a characteristic of Danish design of the era: a single designer often worked in parallel with several houses, each bringing a specific expertise. For the collector, this means that one Wegner model may exist under several markings depending on the original manufacturer, and that its price depends as much on the maker as on the design.

The art of the joint

What links all of Wegner's chairs, beyond the diversity of forms, is the care given to the wood joints. Where others hide their joinery, he shows it: a through-tenon, a visible bend, a transition from one piece of wood to another worked to the point of becoming an ornament. He said a chair should be beautiful from every side, including from underneath.

That care shows in how long the chairs last. A chair whose joints are sound, whose wood is oiled regularly and whose cord is re-tensioned when needed can go through decades without losing its structure: the original quality holds, and a well-kept piece is passed on.

When we offer a Wegner chair, the listing states the identified maker (Carl Hansen & Søn, Johannes Hansen, PP Møbler, Fritz Hansen), the estimated production period and the condition of the wood and seat. Available pieces are gathered on the Hans Wegner page.