The Egg Chair Was Built for a Hotel Lobby

In July 1960 the SAS Royal Hotel opened in Copenhagen, a 22-floor tower that gave the low city skyline something new to look up at. Down in the lobby, guests sank into a deep, curved shell on a four-pronged aluminum foot. Arne Jacobsen had designed that too, along with nearly everything else they touched.

A Hotel Designed Down to the Ashtrays

Jacobsen, born in Copenhagen in 1902, trained as an architect, and the commission from Scandinavian Airlines let him work at full volume. Construction started in 1956. The tower owed a visible debt to Lever House in New York, a point the Victoria and Albert Museum makes plainly in its catalog. What set the job apart was the inside. Jacobsen drew the furniture, the lighting, the textiles, the cutlery and even the ashtrays. Cooper Hewitt calls the result a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art running from the doorknobs to the flatware. That flatware later turned up in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, picked because it looked like the future.

The lobby posed a specific problem. It was a public room full of people between flights, and a normal armchair leaves its sitter on display. The Egg's high, wrapped back fixes that. Swivel it toward the window and you have a small private room inside a big public one. Jacobsen built a family of chairs around it for the same project, including the lower, winged Swan, the Drop and the little Pot lounge chair, plus the Series 3300 seating for the SAS air terminal. Of everything in our design coverage, few objects are this tied to one building.

Wire, Plaster and an Argument About the Year

Fritz Hansen, the Danish maker that still produces the chair, says Jacobsen found the shape by experimenting with wire and plaster in his garage. Design histories usually connect it to Eero Saarinen's Womb chair, and Cooper Hewitt names Saarinen and Charles and Ray Eames as the Americans Jacobsen was watching. Put the Egg next to the Eames Lounge Chair and the conversation between Copenhagen and California in the late 1950s is easy to see.

Even the date is contested. Fritz Hansen and most Jacobsen books say 1958. The V&A, which owns an early example, notes that its own registered description says 1959 and that auction records have used 1957.

The construction under the leather has changed too. The V&A's chair has a molded polystyrene core, and the museum's records say early versions used a material called styropore. Cooper Hewitt's 1958 example, given by Fritz Hansen, lists a steel frame, a fiberglass-reinforced polyurethane foam shell, latex foam rubber and cotton upholstery. Both sit on a cast aluminum swivel base. The current production chair carries the model number 3316 on Fritz Hansen's Egg page.

The factory was the right partner for this kind of object. Cabinetmaker Fritz Hansen got his trade license in Copenhagen in 1872, and the company spent the following decades on steam-bent and laminated wood. Jacobsen's Ant chair gave him his breakthrough with the firm in the early 1950s, and the Series 7 followed in 1955. The Egg and Swan were the next step, moving from bent plywood to upholstered shells, and they sit near the center of the mid-century modern canon because of it.

What Happened to Room 606

The hotel later took the Radisson SAS name and now trades as the Radisson Collection Royal Hotel, Copenhagen. Guest rooms were refitted over the decades, with one exception. Room 606 keeps its original decor, with wengé wood, a grey and blue-green palette, built-in makeup mirrors, a radio and an intercom, plus an Egg, a Swan and one of the rare Drop chairs. Fritz Hansen describes the present lobby as close in many ways to the 1960s original, and the Eggs and Swans are still part of it.

The building did a lot for Jacobsen's career. Oxford dons visited it, and his Munkegård School, before hiring him to design the new St Catherine's College in the 1960s. He won the competition for Danmarks Nationalbank in 1961, then died in 1971 before it was finished, leaving the firm Dissing+Weitling to complete it. If you are planning a trip, our Copenhagen design guide picks up where the hotel leaves off.

Big Brother, McDonald's and Gate Seating

The Egg's second life is the one most people know. It was the diary room chair in the first UK series of Big Brother. The New York Times reported in 2007 that McDonald's had used it in a redesign of a London restaurant, and in 2011 the paper noted Eggs in the boarding area of the renovated Terminal 2 at San Francisco International. A shape that recognizable was always going to end up on television. Plenty of industrial design classics never leave the showroom, and the Egg got out.

Jacobsen also drew an Egg sofa. Only a handful were made, a few of them for the hotel. In leather it shows a seam down the middle, because the shell is too large to cover with two whole cowhides.

Not every Egg in public is the real thing. A McDonald's on Nørrebrogade in Copenhagen has one, though some of the furniture around it is imitation. The silhouette is the easy part to copy, which is why the paper trail from Fritz Hansen or an authorized dealer matters more than the shape. For a full record of an early example, the V&A's catalog entry lays out the materials and the dating dispute in detail.

Upstairs, Room 606 still has its built-in radio, a jet-age hotel's idea of luxury from two decades before the Walkman put music in a pocket.