Arne Jacobsen Egg Chair for Fritz Hansen

Few chairs in design history carry the instant recognition of the Egg Chair. When Arne Jacobsen designed it in 1958 for the lobby of the Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, he wasn't just creating a seat — he was sculpting a private world within a public space.

The genius of the Egg lies in its shell. Carved from a single mould of polyurethane foam over a fibreglass core, it wraps around you in what can only be described as a cocoon-like embrace. Sit in one, and the noise of the room fades. The high, curved back creates an intimate pocket of calm — exactly what Jacobsen intended for weary hotel guests arriving in the Danish capital.

What makes this particular example compelling is its honesty. This is a chair that has been lived in. The fabric of the backrest has come loose from the foam — a known characteristic in well-used early examples. It's a blank canvas: ready for reupholstering in the leather or textile of your choosing, transforming it into something uniquely yours.

The Egg Chair didn't arrive in isolation. It was part of a complete vision Jacobsen created for the SAS Royal Hotel — alongside the Swan Chair, the Drop Chair, and every piece of cutlery and textile in the building. That obsessive, total-design approach was characteristic of Scandinavian modernism at its peak, and it places the Egg firmly in the lineage of designers like Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames, who shared Jacobsen's belief that a chair could be architecture in miniature.

The polished aluminum swivel base rotates smoothly, and the overall proportions remain as striking as the day it left Fritz Hansen's workshop in Allerød. Production of the Egg Chair has never ceased, but there's a presence to these earlier pieces — a weight, a warmth — that sets them apart from their modern counterparts. At VINTZ, every piece ships in a custom-built wooden crate with full transport insurance, so it arrives exactly as it should.