Loccomama

Ren Wan gets into the armchair with William Boesen of Carl Hansen & Son

Here is an imaginary moment. After an arduous day of work and hours staring at the computer screen, your eyes are too sore for televised entertainment and your head too clouded for facebooking. All you need is a GOOD rest, replete with a GOOD chair. You don’t want a steel-cold, neon-coloured stool, or a huge block of objet du désir, but a simple Carl Hansen & Son – a wooden chair from your grandfather’s days; something the likes of Ikea cannot offer.

“When you touch wood, your blood pressure comes down. I don’t have scientific proof, but I am 100% sure it just makes you relax,” said William Boesen, President of Carl Hansen & Son (Japan, CHS), a leading furniture design company.

We were reclining, as our conversation began, in the CHS Wisebone Chair, Boesen’s seat of choice. The unadorned Wisebone might not be the latest ultra-chic in furniture design, but it is a timeless masterpiece that was designed in 1949 by the “Master of the Chair” Hans J. Wegner himself.

“It is inspired by the chair of the Ming Dynasty.” Boesen explained the features of his favourite chair, which enables 180-degree comfortable leg movement. “A craftsman uses a saw to cut and shape the wood and when it needs to be bent, he will steam it to increase flexibility. It’s a complicated process,” Boesen elaborated.

“And guess what the seat is made of – a hundred pieces of hand-woven paper. Three pieces of paper are rolled together to become one cord, and a hundred meters are used in this chair. It’s all done by hand; no machine is able to achieve this.”

Danish furniture classic Carl Hansen & Son began with a humble furniture workshop set up in Odense, Denmark in 1908. Over forty years later, Carl Hansen’s son Holger Hansen invited young carpenter-turned-architect Hans J. Wegner to enter into a collaboration that in 1949 rocketed the duo to global recognition.

“[Wegner] was a master in experimenting with wood. He would play with the form, he would create all sorts of shapes,” said Boesen. Hansen designed some of the most groundbreaking pieces in furniture history for CHS, including the three-legged Shell Chair, which was sitting not far from us.

“Hansen created the Shell Chair in 1963. People thought ‘what the heck is it?’ It looked too futuristic and nobody wanted it, so we made only ten copies.” Boesen recalled. “In 1992 we got a call from Sotheby’s Auction House saying: ‘we are now selling it at USD$25,000 a piece, do you have any more in stock?’ And we said: ‘No but we will make it for you.’ Now the Shell Chair is in Rome, New York, and Tokyo.”

Some find a paradox between environmentalism and wood furniture. Yet according to Boesen, sustainability and eco-friendliness are essential to Carl Hansen’s ethos. According to Boesen, the brand uses only Danish wood, of which the government of Denmark has full control.

“In China and some other countries they sell cheaper furniture because they use timber harvested in an unsustainable way. The Danish government has a clear policy that when you cut down a tree, you must plant a tree. When a tree grows big, it creates a huge shadow below. The younger trees can’t grow because they don’t get the energy from the sun. So when you cut it, you give life to a lot of new trees.”

While many people think of futuristic design as being Star Trek-esque, Carl Hansen & Son has captured both modern and traditional elements in futurism. Its products are sleek and contemporary – and the brand insists that “it doesn’t matter how futuristic a chair may look, it’s not worth anything if you can’t sit in it.”

“Nobody can make wood as we do. When you enter a new mansion with glass, metal and plastic, it’s not the same relaxing feeling,” said Boesen. “Especially in this day and age when life is so fast-paced, we need more than ever to relax when we get home. And we don’t want our homes to look like an office.”

“Simplicity is the most appealing thing to the eyes in the long term. Good design is timeless.” Boesen suggests this type of functionality is a quality unique to good furniture design:

“Design has to be suited for the human body. So no matter how it appears on the outside, on the inside it has to be comfortable to sit in.” Boesen continued, “A human body is a little bit more complex than we think. We don’t like straight angles; we need a bit of curves to recline comfortably.”

Published in WestEast Men’s Collection Issue 2#IMAGINE (Spring 2010)