Collection Story
The Egg™ series by Arne Jacobsen for Fritz Hansen
Fritz Hansen's Egg™ series has two pieces, each sold separately: the Egg™ Lounge Chair 3316 and the Egg™ foot stool 3127. The manufacturer's fact sheet covers both models and dates the design to 1958, a year earlier than the 1959 that the English Wikipedia article on the chair gives.
Made for a hotel
Jacobsen designed the Egg™ for Copenhagen's SAS Royal Hotel. Fritz Hansen's project page says construction of the hotel began in 1956 and that it was ready four years later; Wikipedia dates the opening to 1 July 1960, when King Frederik IX and Queen Ingrid opened it, and adds that Jacobsen designed everything from the façade to the stainless-steel cutlery, including the Swan and Egg chairs in the lobby. The project page calls the Egg™ and Swan™ chairs specially designed for the hotel and says they match the calm of the lobby. Fritz Hansen's heritage timeline presents them, together with the Series 3300™ lounge chair for the hotel's SAS Terminal, as what Jacobsen went on to create after the Ant™.
Relatives
Wikipedia names the Swan chair as the Egg's closest relative and lists several of Jacobsen's plywood chairs as more distant ones. In the Series 3300™ fact sheet, Fritz Hansen describes the 3300 as an elegant contrast to the organic shapes of the Egg™ and Swan™ chairs, all of them made for the same hotel.
What the two pieces share
The sheet describes the foam of both pieces as moulded directly onto a hard polyurethane shell. Both stand on a four-star aluminium base, and the sheet counts five base finishes for the series, from plain aluminium to powder-coated black, warm graphite, silver grey and brown bronze. One textile and leather selection serves the series, with six leather types. The Egg™ is GreenGuard Gold certified according to the sheet, which also names Poland as origin, pre-assembled delivery and disassembly into shell and base. The chair has a swivel base with a tilt mechanism, while the foot stool is without swivel function.
On INTEBEE
On INTEBEE the pieces of this collection can be added to a spec sheet with their official images and dimensions, and every revision of the specification is kept in one place for the project team and suppliers.