Illums Bolighus 1965 Mail Order Catalog

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.

Find vintage Hans Wegner lounge chairs, armchairs, daybeds and other furniture for sale on 1stDibs.

Along with Hans Wegner, Arne Jacobsen and Børge Mogensen, Finn Juhl was one of the great masters of mid-20th-century Danish design. Juhl was the first among that group to have his work promoted overseas, bringing the character of the nation’s furnishings — and the inherent principles of grace, craftsmanship and utility on which they were based — to an international audience. 

A stylistic maverick, Juhl embraced expressive, free-flowing shapes in chair, credenzas and sofa designs much earlier than his colleagues, yet even his quietest pieces incorporate supple, curving forms that are at once elegant and ergonomic.

As a young man, Juhl hoped to become an art historian, but his father steered him into a more practical course of study in architecture. He began designing furniture in the late 1930s, a discipline in which, despite his education, Juhl was self-taught, and quite proud of the fact. 

Juhl’s earliest works, designed in the late 1930s, are perhaps his most idiosyncratic. The influence of modern art is clear in his 1939 Pelican chair: an almost Surrealist take on the classic wing chair. Critics reviled the piece, however; one said it looked like a "tired walrus." Juhl had tempered his creativity by 1945, when the workshop of Danish cabinetmaker Niels Vodder began to issue his designs. Yet Juhl’s now-classic NV 45 armchair still demonstrates panache, with a seat that floats above the chair’s teak frame.

Juhl first exhibited his work in the United States in 1950, championed by Edgar Kaufmann Jr., an influential design critic and scion of America’s most prominent family of modern architecture and design patrons. (Kaufmann’s father commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright’s design of the house “Fallingwater.”) 

Juhl quickly won a following for such signature designs as the supremely comfortable Chieftan lounge chair, the Judas table — a piece ornamented with stylish inlaid silver plaquettes — and the biomorphic Baker sofa. After an article authored by Kaufmann on Juhl and his work appeared in the U.S.-based magazine Interiors in 1948, he began receiving American commissions. 

Kaufmann commissioned Juhl to create the exhibition design for, and contribute pieces to, the 1951 edition of the Good Design shows he organized for MoMA and Chicago’s Merchandise Mart. Baker Furniture asked Juhl to design for the firm, and he produced a collection of chairs, tables and cabinets, and, later, the 1957 sofa. 

Scandinavian modernist seating, such as the chairs and sofas Juhl created for Baker, became immensely popular in postwar America, as the seeds of the Scandinavian style that Juhl sowed took root and spread in the United States. Juhl and his work featured prominently in the landmark show “Design from Scandinavia,” which opened in 1954 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and traveled to 24 museums in the U.S. and Canada; over three years, it was seen by more than a million people.

Juhl’s furniture — as well as his ceramics, tableware and accessories — has an air of relaxed sophistication and elegance that is unique in the realm of mid-century design.

Find vintage Finn Juhl armchairs, coffee tables, desks and other furniture for sale on 1stDibs.