Arne Jacobsen: The man who invented a golden egg

Arne Jacobsen: The man who invented a golden egg
Independent UK
Published: 23 June 2007

Half a century ago, Arne Jacobsen came up with a design that changed the world of furniture and still sells - expensively - by the thousand. Guy Adams tells the remarkable story of the Egg chair

It's been a tricky week for eggs. Villified by a government quango, which banned a 50th anniversary re-run of the Tony Hancock television advertisement urging people to "go to work on an egg", they joined the likes of cigarettes and Big Macs on the health police's hit-list.

Every cloud has a silver lining, though. For just as the egg was achieving dietary notoriety, another 50th anniversary came along, propelling at least one of its family members back to the very summit of contemporary fashion. The Egg chair, one of the most enduring symbols of the Modernist movement, was created in a Danish garage 50 years ago. Today, the futuristic, armchair is more extraordinarily popular than ever before.

For five decades, the quirky swivel-seats have brightened up fashionable interiors at home and abroad. They've starred in Hollywood blockbusters such as Men in Black and the Austin Powers movies, cradled the bottoms of sex symbols from Marilyn Monroe to Heather Lockyear, and jazzed-up countless trendy hotels, offices, bars and clubs.

In London, to take two examples, Foxton's estate agents flog £2m flats while sitting in Eggs, and Big Brother contestants have spouted inanities in the "diary room" from their comfortable embrace. In New York, club-class travellers relax in them while talking big figures on their cell-phones in the lounge at JFK airport.

Original Egg Chairs, made by the Danish company Fritz Hansen and priced at a hefty £5,000, sell by the thousand all over the world. Cheaper reproductions, at anything from £800 to £2,000, have been snapped up by the million. Right now, they've never been more popular. Fritz Hansen's sales have increased by 50 per cent in the past two years to a historic high, pushing the company's turnover from £50 to £58m. Original examples from the 1950s have sold at auction in New York for up to $70,000 (£35,500).

For all this, we must thank one man: Arne Jacobsen, a famous but reclusive Jewish architect who rarely left his Copenhagen studio and was known as "the fat man". He designed the Egg Chair as part of a commission to create a new landmark hotel in the centre of the city in the 1950s.

The SAS Royal Hotel, which was owned by the airline of the same name, was the largest hotel in Denmark, and the first skyscraper in the country's history. Compared by critics to a "glass cigarbox", the rectangular steel structure remains a sort of monument to the Modernist movement. Jacobsen, who is arguably the most important Scandinavian designer of the 20th century, pioneeed the Modernist movement in which architects began to design both the interiors, and the actual day-to-day contents of their buildings.

"At the SAS hotel, this meant he created everything from the door handles and cutlery to the carpets and colour scheme," says Gemma Curtin, a curator at the Design Museum.

"His philosophy was described as 'from spoon to city', and the chair was part of that. The Egg chair has soft sides. It's really organic, and stems from nature: it looks like a broken shell that a little chick has just run out of. It's sophisticated and minimalist, but still has a sense of fun. You can't imagine a child walking past without wanting to jump in. It's just incredibly warm and relaxing."

Jacobsen - who died in 1971 at the age of 69 - built the prototype of the chair in his garage in the north Klampenborg district of Copenhagen in 1957, and after several minor adjustments, the chair was unveiled to the public at a local design show.

When the hotel opened, Egg chairs filled the lobby and bar area, and were found in every bedroom. Fritz Hansen, then an upmarket, family-owned furniture manufacturer, was handed a contract to build replicas for fashion-conscious homeowners.

In keeping with the tradition that true classics develop rather than immediately catching on, the Egg chair took a while to become popular, and initial sales were disappointing. But by the mid-1960s, buyers had grown to love its revolutionary design.

The design expert Stephen Bayley includes the Egg chair in Design: Intelligence Made Visible, his new guide to modern design classics co-authored by Sir Terence Conran.

He believes that "chair design ended" in the late 1950s. "This was when Charles Eames produced his Aluminium Group classics, and Arne Jacobsen his Egg," he says. "Since then, there have been no changes in human physiology, nor the discovery of any relevant new materials. And no genuine improvements in what a modern chair might be.

"Jacobsen's achievement was to turn the austerity of functionalism into something elegant and spare, yet luxurious as well. He thought of architecture and furniture design as two expressions of the same desire to achieve both physical and psychological comfort."

Today, Fritz Hansen makes Egg chairs to the original design, save for an optional recliner, which was added in the early 1970s. Their chairs are completely handmade, and more than 1,300 stitches are used to add the upholstery, which is made from either leather or fabric.

The SAS hotel, for its part, keeps one of its rooms, number 606, in the original decoration. The junior suite, which is booked-up months in advance, costs upwards of £450 a night, and contains an Egg dating from 1958 next to its dressing table.

Recent years have seen a revival in the Egg's commercial fortunes, along with other 1950s classics. It has a 3D trademark with the EU (much like a Coke bottle), and Fritz Hansen sells thousands of the original version a year. Cheaper reproduction pieces are also made by a host of fashionable furniture retailers.

"They've been incredibly popular in the past year or so," says John Cohen, the manager of Modern Classics Direct, one such company. "I think the biggest reason is actually the increasing number of new-build properties on the market.

"Egg-style chairs sit very well with minimalist architecture. You don't see many of them being sold to people who own period properties ... All designs go in and out of fashion, of course, but with the Egg, you always know it'll eventually come back in."

At the top level, Egg chairs can now command a staggering sum. Sotheby's in London sold a particularly fine example dating from 1960 for £30,000 in October.

"I have watched this grow and grow since the birth of the modern design auction in 1999 or 2000," says James Zematis, the director of 20th century design at Sotheby's in New York. "There is a surging demand for all post-war Danish furniture. At the top end of the market, a good example with an accompanying ottoman will start at $15,000 to 20,000 ... Right now we are often seeing spike prices being achieved when you get two Danish fetishists bidding against each other."

The sky-high prices have led to a burgeoning market in Egg chair thefts, which Fritz Hansen are attempting to combat by holding a database of serial numbers which all genuine Eggs have carved into the foot.

"You can always tell a reproduction," says the company's spokesman, Jan Helleskov. "I look at things like the stitching and the dimensions, and the basic shape and the fabric. We have never come across anything we can't spot as a fake ... When one is stolen, we will also flag that up."

Arne Jacobsen, meanwhile, went on to become one of the world's greatest architects. Shortly after completing the Egg chair and SAS hotel, he was comissioned by Oxford University to design a new college, which later became St Catherine's.

At the time, the decision to entrust a foreigner with this landmark job was controversial. One critic wrote to The Times describing it as the biggest insult to British architecture since a Frenchman was entrusted with the rebuilding of Canterbury Cathedral in the 11th century. Today, though, Jacobsen's legacy is celebrated. At St Catherine's, students and dons still use the Modernist knives, forks and chairs he designed to go with his glass and steel building, which itself is grade I listed.

And next year, for the anniversary of the Egg's first mass manufacture, Fritz Hansen will hold a formal celebration.