Egg (chair)

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The Egg chair

The Egg is a famous modern chair designed by Arne Jacobsen in 1959 for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, Denmark. It has a steel frame with a fabric cover and is made by Fritz Hansen. The chair’s smooth, rounded shape shows Jacobsen’s futuristic style and draws on ideas from Eero Saarinen’s Womb chair. It is related to the Swan chair and to several of Jacobsen’s plywood chairs.

There is also a couch version of the Egg, but only a few were made because it is hard to manufacture and leather upholstery would show a large seam down the middle. Using fabric avoids this seam. The couch was very expensive, costing around 400,000 Danish kroner (about $75,000).

The Egg has appeared in real places, including a McDonald’s restaurant in London as part of a design concept, and another Egg chair in Copenhagen (some are imitations). It was used as the diary room chair in the first UK Big Brother. The Egg is also found in spaces like San Francisco International Airport’s Terminal 2.