Bene Office Furniture

Ahead of the curve

I spent most of my education sitting on a 3107 – from the first day in the assembly hall of primary school at the age of six, listening to the headmaster welcoming us, to an endless number of long afternoons at the library of the University of Copenhagen. I’ve waited on a 3107, sick, pregnant or with a toothache, in several waiting rooms; I’ve done job interviews on a 3107, and I’ve enjoyed a great many dinner parties on a 3107. I’ve danced on a 3107 – and on that occasion I was grateful that its designer decided to give it four legs instead of three. I even jumped into the New Millennium from the seat of a black 3107.

And I’m not the only one. Also known fondly as the Seven Chair, Arne Jacobsen’s design has become the most important success story in Danish furniture history and one of the most popular chairs in the world, with more than five million being manufactured since its launch in 1955. And 50 years on, it still dominates popular culture. Music videos, fashion magazines and television shows… Jacobsen’s chair turns up everywhere from MTV videos to commercials.

Yet it hasn’t lost its exclusiveness. Its simple construction and smooth, elegant curves makes the Seven chair an icon of modernity. It remains the natural choice for style- and quality-conscious customers worldwide, from MoMA in New York and Gucci in Italy to Hong Kong Telecom in China and Lufthansa in Germany.

Of all Arne Jacobsen’s stacking chairs, the Seven chair is the best seller. But it all began with Model 3100, the Ant chair, in 1952.
The Ant was designed for the canteen of Danish pharmaceuticals firm Novo, and the story goes that Jacobsen first contacted Fritz Hansen in order to produce 140 chairs. Fritz Hansen, however, didn’t want to begin production until Jacobsen had persuaded the firm to make 300 copies – by promising to buy the remaining 160 chairs himself if they weren’t sold by the end of the year.

The Ant became the starting point of Jacobsen’s global fame as a furniture designer. Everyone agreed that the chair was extraordinarily elegant and modern with its moulded plywood seat. Still, there were some critical voices, asking why it only had three legs, and why it didn’t have armrests.
According to legend, Arne Jacobsen didn’t take any of the objections too seriously – for instance, he replied that if you can ride a bicycle with two wheels, then you can sit on a chair with three legs. But in retrospect it seems that he might have been paying attention after all. When he introduced his next chair at the international exhibition H55 in Helsingborg, Sweden, in 1955, it was the four-legged Seven chair.

Like the Ant, the Seven chair was lightweight and easily stackable. It was launched in two versions, with and without armrests. The designer was apparently most proud of the one with armrests, Model 3207. But the rest of the world seemed to disagree, as today Model 3107, the version without, is one of the best-known pieces of furniture in the world.
Originally the Seven chair was only available in black, white or beech. But over the years its colour spectrum has been expanded by, among others, the Danish architect Verner Panton and the Danish painter Poul Gernes. Today it is available in a wide range of colours in lacquer or lazur, as well as natural wood veneers.

Of course, it was inevitable that a success like the Seven chair would be plagiarised. And in fact one of the most famous photographs of the Seven chair doesn’t have anything to do with Jacobsen’s chair. When Lewis Morley took his celebrated photos of call girl Christine Keeler – whose affair with the British Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, and the Russian Assistant Naval Attaché, Eugene Ivanov, led to a major political scandal in the early 1960s – Keeler was sitting on a knock-off of the Seven chair. Morley had bought half a dozen of them in a sale at Heal’s in London for five shillings each in 1960, five years after the original chair had been introduced.
Today Fritz Hansen often comes across imitations of the chair. But if you put them alongside the genuine article, it is obvious which is the original.

Signe Løntoeft