I never say to myself that now I’m going to make a piece of art. I tell myself I want to make a good chair. H.J. Wegner 

I would venture to say that Hans J. Wegner is the most gifted carpenter the world has ever known. H.S. Møller 

In 1960, when John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon sat down in front of a television camera to debate Communism, Cuba, and the Cold War, how many of the 70 million viewers cared about the chairs the adversaries sat in? A lot more than you’d think. Specially requested by JFK as a comfortable support for his notorious bad back, the unusual design - by Hans Wegner, a woodworker little known outside his native Denmark - immediately caught the attention of designers around the country, gaining such rapid appeal that it became known simply as “The Chair”, a label it retains to this day. 

Designed in 1949 and still manufactured in Denmark by PP Mobler (originally by Johannes Hansen) The Chair, or 501 as Wegner called it (he gave his chairs only numbers, never names), remains an unrivalled icon of the Danish Modern design movement and was referred to by Interiors magazine as the world’s most beautiful chair. Paola Antonelli, a former curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, paid her own tribute to The Chair saying, “First and foremost, it’s comfortable, and saying that it’s comfortable before saying it’s beautiful is really high praise, because the truth is that it’s incredibly elegant.” It is a piece of furniture at once ancient and modern, a kind of archetypal chair with only the essentials; a vertical semicircle of wood sitting on four tapered legs with a cane or leather seat between them. The result is purely modern in its elegance paired with economy of form. 

The son of a shoemaker, Wegner was born in a small town in Denmark in 1914, where he later took up woodworking and cabinetry as a boy. After studying design in Copenhagen, he created furniture for Arne Jacobsen’s modernist town hall in Aarhus during the late 1930’s, and in 1943 opened his own studio in the same city. By the 1950’s Wegner - along with Jacobsen, Bruno Mathsson of Sweden, Borge Mogensen, and Finn Juhl - had became synonymous with the term Danish Modern, exporting his inimitable style of highly crafted, modern reinterpretations of historic furniture, around the world. In the early days, it was a tightly knit group that “... worked in a spirit of fun”, recalls Wegner, “None of us dreamed that we might one day make a living from the furniture we designed.” 

Wegner worked intuitively, as he recalls the design of The Chair – “I was working on the full scale model and was unhappy about the arm. Its form didn’t seem right to me. I took a walk, thought it over, and sawed off the offending portion. I glued on a new piece and gave it the shape it has today.” He was known for his belief that a chair needed to be structurally sound enough to last at least 50 years and he personally supervised all production, even at the height of his fame when three separate Danish companies shared production of the various designs. He refused many offers to associate with larger American companies, saying that he preferred working with people he was familiar with. His vision, though modern, was underscored by a firm belief in the timeless skills of craft. “Machines can do a lot,” he said, “but my furniture still requires a great deal of skilled handwork.” For example, he would not use steam-bent wood (which is how most of Alvar Aalto’s curved pieces are made); he considered it not exact enough and he had PP Mobler fabricate his Captain’s chair from a lamination of 15 separate pieces of sliced ash. 

Wegner’s particular design skill was in reinterpreting historic furniture designs; refining, modernizing and simplifying their style while increasing their comfort and affordability. His largest selling chair remains the so-called Wishbone or Y Chair (CH 24) designed in 1950, and now available in several materials and colors. It is an evolution of an earlier design, the Chinese Chair (FH4283) from 1944, which in turn was inspired by an illustration of a genuine Chinese Chair in book called Types of Furniture that Wegner stumbled upon ten years earlier. He relaxed the stiff formal rectangularity of the original, refining and purifying it down to its barest essentials. It was this alchemy that turned the quiet & mild-mannered Danish carpenter into international modernist celebrity. 

Though he is largely known through his extraordinary chair designs, Wegner designed other pieces of furniture with the same sensibility; mostly tables of all types and sizes, but some sideboards and occasional furniture including a beautiful sewing cart and even some classic modern lamps for the Louis Poulsen company. Because of their historic precedents, these pieces fit in comfortably with almost any decorating sensibility, from the most minimalist modern room of steel and glass to spaces of eclectic clutter with only a hint of modernity about them. For example, the PP550 Peacock Chair (1947) is derived from the classic 18th Century English Windsor Chair and would be perfectly at home in my grandmother’s living room, or the J16 Rocking Chair (1944), modeled on the enduring dignity of Shaker furniture and still a favorite in the nursery (I bought one when my child was born). 

Many of Wegner’s pieces are still in production but over time prices have edged up beyond the budget of most of us middle-class modernists. Vintage items are a cheaper way to go unless it’s a rare item, in which case be prepared to battle against retailers and collectors with serious money. Most expensive are typically the early pieces by Johannes Hansen; they’re scarce and Hansen was a true cabinetmaker, not a production shop, so these are considered the 

quintessential Wegner pieces. Nearly all pieces should be signed and those by PP Mobler, Carl Hansen, Ry Mobler, and Andreas Tuck (mostly tables) will cost proportionately less yet are exquisite examples of one of the great masters of modernism. But it’s not enough to simply own these chairs - they need to be used, for a Wegner liked to say, "A chair is only finished when someone sits in it." 

The Pearl District in Portland, Oregon is one of those rare American urban neighborhoods that one associates more often with New York or Boston than the Pacific Northwest; turn of the century brick and stone buildings intermixed with towers of glass, street sculptures, parks, and loading docks, filled with small scale shops, restaurants, galleries and a multitude of places to live, from high rise condominiums to converted warehouses. On a visit to their grown children in Portland, Pat and Michael Del Castello spotted one of the “pearls” that gave this district its name; a block of elegant two-story brick warehouses that once served the Portland and Seattle Railroad as storage facilities. The pair of historic buildings facing each other (now listed on the national historic register) had each been divided into eight, 20’ wide by 100’ deep units of raw loft space, and several were still for sale. 

Pat and Michael immediately saw potential here. If they bought more than a single unit, they could live in an older warehouse loft of their own design, and simultaneously open a gallery for Michael’s ever-growing and frequently changing collection of 19th and early 20th century American folk art. Through the local architectural grapevine, they heard of 

Jeff Lamb of Lamb Design Studios. As the former lead designer in two of Portland’s most prestigious architectural firms, Lamb has been consistently creative at all scales for many years, winning awards for everything from high rises to the exuberant interiors of the downtown American Institute of Architects. Now heading up his own bustling office, he teaches and is designing a number of contemporary housing projects, large and small. Fortunately for the Del Castello’s, Lamb had only recently returned from Italy where, under a University of Oregon Fellowship, he studied the work of the modern Italian master, Carlo Scarpa, best known for his fanatical attention to detail in layering modern materials into ancient buildings. 

Initially, Michael and Pat thought big and they challenged Lamb to integrate six of the units into a combined living and gallery space. They quickly found that two units on the corner would suit their needs, but Lamb’s approach to the larger design sold them on his ideas and way of working, and Lamb was equally impressed with his new clients. “Michael’s company fabricates stainless steel components, “ says Lamb, “so he already had a very refined sense of precision detail and craft in an industrial vocabulary. And he was excited about contrasting two industrial concepts; the old with the new. Michael’s meticulous nature dovetailed with my own lifelong interest in details as the definition of architecture.” 

“In a way,” Lamb continues, “the design could be described as one big finished piece of casework set within the existing building shell.” The old predominantly “rough” warehouse of brick walls and wood joists provides a rich background for the new contrasting “smooth” vocabulary of stainless steel, oiled wood, polished colored concrete, translucent and colored glass of all types, and a long wall of travertine following the original dividing line between the two units. This stone-faced wall stretches across the entire length and height of the interior, both connecting and separating space. This wall, hinged and motorized at the front to pivot open like an enormous castle door, joining the gallery and the lower living areas during events, was the first element of Lamb’s initial design sketches. “It acts like a spine,” Lamb says, and as such, conceals earthquake braces, pipes and ducts, and other services within its hollow mass, while more delicate objects are supported from it like ribs, such as the glass stair, which dematerializes into a ribbon of flickering light as it floats alongside the dense mass of the wall. 

Of the original 1908 shell, Lamb says "We revealed only the best parts of it; some of the wood floor framing, the steel beams, and the columns. This gives a sense of ornament and scale in the space without applying anything ornamental. The original six steel columns were being thrown away, but we managed to salvage them – in fact, this is the only townhouse to reuse the structural columns. Instead of painting them, they were stripped down and “blued”, a chemical process used in treating steel used in gun barrels. 

Michael knew all about this since among his many objects are some wonderful antique guns. In the end, the result was so beautiful – especially juxtaposed with the stainless - that we used it for all the raw steel.” 

After settling on the design of the main wall and how to express the shell, Lamb worked on what he calls “vignettes”- implying smaller spaces within the loft using carefully placed, exquisitely detailed constructions of varying materials and size. Some of the most prominent are the sculptural volumes of glass and steel containing mundane functions like the serene bathroom in the gallery (called “The Cube”), the master shower stall (“The Cylinder”), the master water closet and bidet (“The Orb”). Other constructions hold closets, storage, and cabinets; places normally found tucked away in the dark. “By using translucent glass for these functions, there is privacy not only within them but more importantly, for the spaces between”, says Lamb, “And in the middle of this long space with no windows in the middle, the glass cubes let daylight pass through them into the surrounding areas. At night, with gentle lighting inside, they glow like big lanterns within the darkened space of the lofts.” 

Lamb became fascinated with the possibilities of glass when, as a designer in large architectural firms, he worked on schools and libraries where both natural light and privacy were needed in the same place. “People would say, we need a wall here but we still need light and I realized that translucent glass – engineered to meet code requirements - could solve this problem. In architecture school, we were taught that you could either make a wall or you could make a void, but that’s an unnecessarily limiting point of view. With the right design and engineering, translucent glass can deliver both.” 

Glass is used throughout in playful as well as functional ways; colored bars of cast glass – blue in the gallery bathroom cube, red (Lamb refers to it as “cabernet”) in the wine rack, gold in the bedroom’s multi-purpose headboard – light fixtures, countertops, cabinet doors, and furniture. And finally, oiled maple, rosewood, mahogany, and ebony accents give warmth and provide contrast to the stone, steel and glass. The literal warmth rises 

up from the floors in a radiant heating system under 200 year old pine floors recycled from a barn near Boston. 

A project like this one required an extraordinary builder who could work with a diverse team, including a client actively participating in the construction (in the end it was Michael who came up with the technical solution for the glass stair treads). 

Lamb explained that “we interviewed several top quality builders in town and selected Don Tankersley (of Don Tankersly Construction) partly because his method of working was to be on the job himself every day. We brought him in during the design process, because of all the different subcontractors and unusual fabricators. He did an amazing job with everything,” because, as Michael said of Tankersley, “He put his heart and soul into the place.” As did everyone. “This was a remarkable opportunity for all of us,” reflects Lamb, “I was able to build ideas I’d been working on for twenty years. Who would think, walking by this quiet old warehouse, that inside is this wonderful dialogue about old and new, public and private, detail and craft? And because the interior is designed for change, who can predict its form in twenty years or a hundred and twenty years? For Michael and Pat, who relish change, not knowing the answer is part of what they love about being here.”