Hans Wegner's Wishbone Chair Is Fourteen Parts and 120 Meters of Paper

In 1949 a Danish furniture maker called Carl Hansen & Søn finally got the designer it had been chasing. Holger Hansen, the founder's son, had kept a close eye on Hans J. Wegner throughout the 1940s, and that year Wegner agreed to a partnership. The brief was simple and hard at the same time. The company wanted a chair of real quality that could also be made in numbers. Wegner answered with a light wooden armchair, a woven paper seat and a back rest split down the middle into a Y. Carl Hansen put it into production in 1950. It has not stopped making it since.

The chair is officially the CH24. Most people know it as the Wishbone Chair, or the Y Chair, and it became the biggest commercial success of Wegner's long career.

The cabinetmaker from Tønder

Wegner was born on April 2, 1914 in Tønder, a town that was then part of Prussia in the German Empire. At 14 he was apprenticed to a master cabinetmaker named H. F. Stahlberg, and at 17 he finished his apprenticeship by building a lady's desk as his journeyman's piece. He took further courses at the Danish Technological Institute and the School of Arts and Crafts, worked for Arne Jacobsen, and in 1943 opened his own studio in Aarhus. Jacobsen would go on to make the Egg Chair, a very different answer to the question of how a modern Dane should sit.

That bench training explains a lot about the Wishbone. Wegner thought like a man who had to build what he drew. Carl Hansen & Søn describes his aim as the simplest possible design of four legs, a seat and a combined back and armrest, and the CH24 is very close to exactly that.

A portrait, an emperor and a Ming chair

The shape has an unusual origin. In 1944 Wegner designed a series of China Chairs for Fritz Hansen. According to the Wikipedia entry on Wegner, that series was inspired by a portrait of Danish merchants sitting in traditional Ming dynasty chairs, and he had also studied a Chinese chair pictured in a book by Ole Wanscher. Carl Hansen & Søn tells the story a little differently, describing a series of chairs inspired by the thrones of Chinese emperors. Either way, the source was Chinese seating, and two of the four China Chairs went into production.

The Wishbone is the leanest descendant of that line. Carl Hansen calls the 1949 chair the most recent and precise example of the inspiration. Wegner kept the curving top rail that wraps around the sitter and serves as both back and arms, and stripped away nearly everything else.

How the Y holds it together

Look at the chair from behind and the logic shows. The back legs curve and taper upward to meet that wrap-around top rail, and the Y-shaped back piece sits between them, supporting the rail at its center. The Y is what gave the chair its nickname, and it does real work. It is the main support for the back.

The chair looks simple and is not. According to Carl Hansen & Søn's own account of the CH24, each one is made from fourteen individual components cut from seasoned heartwood, in a process of more than 100 steps. Wikipedia's history of the chair notes that the back legs were turned by a sub-supplier and the top bar was steam-bent at an outside factory. In the mid-1990s the seat height was raised by 2 centimeters, a small adjustment to a design that has otherwise barely moved.

The paper seat, woven by hand

The seat is the part people touch first and the part that surprises them. It is paper. During World War II and the years after, shortages pushed designers, Wegner included, toward materials that were easier to get, and paper cord was one result. Carl Hansen says Wegner adapted an existing method called envelope weaving to paper cord in 1949, for this chair.

The pattern divides the seat into four triangles that meet in the middle, like the folded flaps on the back of an envelope. Each seat is still woven by hand from more than 120 meters of paper cord, and a skilled weaver takes about an hour to finish one. Carl Hansen sources the cord from Swedish forests and does the weaving at its own factory.

Seventy-five years and counting

Wegner kept working at a remarkable pace. He designed more than 500 chairs over his life, over 100 of which went into mass production, and earned the nickname King of Chairs. His Round Chair, from the same year as the Wishbone, became famous when John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon both sat in it for the first televised presidential debate on September 26, 1960. In 1951 he shared the first Lunning Prize with the Finnish designer Tapio Wirkkala. He died in Copenhagen on January 26, 2007, at 92, and in 2014 Designmuseum Danmark marked his centenary with a retrospective called Just One Good Chair.

The Wishbone, meanwhile, simply kept selling. Japan accounts for more than a quarter of annual production, which makes a certain sense for a chair that started with Asian furniture. Carl Hansen has also marked Wegner's birthday with limited editions, among them a dark oak version in 2018, a leather seat in 2019 and a navy blue chair in 2020.

It belongs with the other great chairs of the period, even if it took the opposite route. The Eames Lounge Chair put molded plywood and leather to work, and the Panton Chair went all the way to a single piece of plastic. The Wishbone went back toward solid wood, hand weaving and a silhouette borrowed from Chinese seats. To see Danish modern where it was made, start with our Copenhagen design guide.

For more, see our furniture hub, the Mid-Century Modern hub and the rest of the Design section.

Fourteen parts, a hundred steps and an hour of weaving per seat. Three quarters of a century on, that is still how the chair gets made.