What Is It About That Chair?

Arne Jacobsen's iconic Egg has beguiled us for 50 years

Craig Kellogg -- Interior Design, 3/1/2008 12:00:00 AM

“The only thing I can say is—Jetsons!” That's David Mann, principal of MR Architecture + Decor, on the subject of the Egg chair. Then there's Kenyan-born Shamir Shah. As a new arrival in New York two decades ago, he perceived the chair to be “straight off a Bond movie set.” Today, the principal of Shamir Shah Design wonders with a laugh, “What were they putting in the water in Copenhagen?”

Arne Jacobsen's design may seem iconic now—a “brilliant piece of swiveling genius,” in Shah's estimation. But the Danish press initially savaged the SAS Royal Hotel, the 1958 masterpiece for which Jacobsen dreamed up not only the Egg but also the Pot, Drop, Swan, and Giraffe chairs. “The critics hadn't seen that biomorphic kind of furniture before,” says Troy Halterman, who sells the Egg chair at Troy in New York. “I think it was shocking for them.”

Halterman recalls being the “only kid on the block in Salt Lake City” whose mother had an Egg chair in the family room. Hers was covered in lemon-yellow wool, the better to coordinate with the yellow patent leather on the groovy tufted sofas and the lime-green shag on the concrete floor. (Though the sofas and shag are long gone, she hung on to her Egg.) When he moved East, he got his own Egg chair, a leather-covered vintage one. It's now dark brown because of all the saddle oil he's rubbed into the surface over the years—fastidiousness that paid off one horrendous day when an adjacent window stayed open during a downpour.

After importing loads of vintage Eggs from Denmark and selling them at Troy in the 1990's, Halterman jumped at the chance to replace Knoll as the exclusive local showroom for new production pieces at that time. Before Knoll, the chairs used to sell through the ICF showroom, where a young salesperson named Deborah Rathbun developed a fondness for them. Rathbun eventually went out on her own as a marketing consultant, and she and Halterman recently joined forces on a video homage documenting the personal Egg memories of family and friends.

Among those friends is her former ICF colleague Janine James, a branding consultant with a multidisciplinary firm called the Moderns. Part of a bridge generation that kept the flame alive, James recounts a typical response to Jacobsen's mod chair from skeptical interior designers in the shabby-chic 1980's: “That old thing is so dated.”

“Children who were breast-fed shabby chic missed the Eggs,” Interior Design Hall of Fame member Lee Mindel explains. Mid-century furniture reappeared, he argues, as an antidote to a supposed coziness that had quickly evolved into just another brand of claustrophobia. Dealer and curatorial advisor Larry Weinberg suggests another reason for the resurgence of the Egg: It resolved a nettlesome challenge associated with wide-open modernist floor plans. “Chairs began to take on a whole new sculptural function,” Weinberg says. Think of the Egg as a Henry Moore bronze reimagined as a soft construction by Jean Arp.

Shelton, Mindel & Associates might just be the Egg's biggest supporter stateside. Mindel estimates he's specified more than 50 chairs since 1978, when the firm opened, and several have run on magazine covers. “I cannot remember not using them,” he says. “Everybody thinks they're comfortable. And they're no-maintenance. They don't require puffing or cleaning.” (Except the leather ones, of course.)Mindel doesn't even mind when McDonald's in-house designers and Atelier Archange co-opt the Egg's cool factor for an upscale fast-food prototype in London, where the chairs are covered in mouthwatering shades of apple green, electric blue, and bubble-gum pink. “With such perfectly conceived things,” he says, “it doesn't matter if they're all over the place.”

In fact, the chairs are becoming ubiquitous enough to be enmeshed in false memories. When Weinberg went online to Google the presence of Egg chairs on The Dating Game, he found instead a different, tufted chair he could not even identify. Mann recalled George Jetson bounding into one of the rarer desk-height Eggs at his office in the opening sequence of The Jetsons, but YouTube reveals that the cartoon chair looks more like Henrik Thor-Larsen's Ovalia, the 1968 design seen on the poster for Men in Black II.

According to Michael Sheridan's Room 606: The SAS House and the Work of Arne Jacobsen, a half dozen pieces from the SAS Royal Hotel are still in production, celebrating their golden anniversary this year. However, all aren't loved equally. “The Swan chair is really nice, but it's not as powerful a statement,” Mann believes. And Halterman observed, while shooting his video, that there was “more to say about the Egg.” Even Fritz Hansen, which manufactures both the Egg and Swan, appears to be playing favorites—with two anniversary versions. Besides the company's 999 limited-editionEggs featuring chocolate-brown leather and suede upholstery and a hand-polished solid bronze base, artist Tal R is producing 50 more in a patchwork of vintage fabric and launching them during Milan's Salone Internazionale del Mobile.

Clearly, the egg comes first.