Egg™ Lounge Chair
About
Lounge chairs rarely need to enclose you to be comfortable, yet the Fritz Hansen Egg Chair was designed on exactly that premise, and it holds up sixty-seven years later. Arne Jacobsen shaped the shell for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen in 1958, and the logic was specific: give a person sitting in a hotel lobby the feeling of a room within a room. The silhouette still reads as sculptural, but the curvature is functional first.
The construction underneath the upholstery explains why the chair holds its shape after decades of use. A fiberglass-reinforced polyurethane foam shell forms the structural core, with a harder inner layer of RigiPur foam padded outward by softer FlexiPUR, the two working together so the chair gives where you want it to and holds where you need it. Upholstery in wool, viscose, or leather is hand-sewn directly onto that shell, which keeps the surface taut without visible seams pulling across the curves. The four-star satin-polished aluminum base swivels a full 360 degrees and tilts, meaning the chair moves with you rather than fixing you in place.
What the Egg Chair signals today is slightly different from what it signaled at the SAS Royal. It has become shorthand for a certain kind of design literacy, which means it attracts people who know the reference and people who simply respond to the form. Fritz Hansen has kept the production standards close to the original, which is rarer than it sounds for a chair that has been in continuous production this long. For anyone furnishing a room where the chair will be the only seat that matters, that consistency is the point.
