Carl Hansen and Hans J. Wegner

Of all the Danish furniture designers, Hans J. Wegner (°1914 - 2007) is considered one of the most creative and productive. With more than 500 designed chairs, he is also known as the master of chairs. Many of those design chairs are considered masterpieces and have become "collector's items" all over the world.

He was part of a golden generation that created the wave of Danish design: "Many foreigners have asked me how the Danish style is made. I replied that it's a continuous process of purification and simplification, a reduction to the simplest possible composition of 4 legs, a seat and a back and armrest".

At the heart of his legacy is this focus on expressing the soul of the furniture, where simplicity and functionality can be admired in all its beauty. That is why so many of his designs not only end up in museums, but are actually experienced daily in people's homes and passed down through generations.

Wegner was born in 1914 in Tonder, in the south of Denmark, as the son of a shoemaker. At the age of 14 he started an apprenticeship with a cabinetmaker. After 3 years of learning and experimenting with his first designs he moved to Copenhagen where he went to school in an art school before becoming an architect.

He collaborated with Arne jacobsen and Erik Moller in Arhus on the furniture design of the new town hall of Arhus in 1940. It was in that same year that Wegner started working with cabinet maker Johannes Hansen who was a driving force in bringing new furniture designs to the Danish people. His experience as a cabinet maker ensured that the two fully understood each other in how to use existing techniques to create new forms. Wegner's aesthetic eye was based on a deep respect for wood and curiosity towards other natural materials which enabled him to bring an organic, natural softness to formalist minimalism. 

He founded his own design studio in 1943. Wegner made his first chair for Carl Hansen & Son in 1949. The CH24 chair - also called Wishbone Chair - was inspired by his previous work for the China Chairs and became an instant success. They have been in production at Carl Hansen ever since and are still one of the most popular Wegner chairs to this day.

During his lifetime Wegner received numerous important design awards, including the Lunning prize, the great prize of Milan triennial...

Many design museums from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York to the Neue Sammlung in Munich have works by Wegner in their collection.