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Be embraced by the great bear paws of this all time maximum comfort easy chair. Consider it an investment for life as gifted Danish craftsmen spend at least two weeks hand crafting each chair to the highest standards. The solid wooden frame is strongly joint and shaped to form a solid base for the comprehensive traditional upholstery work.
Four natural materials constitute the comfortable upholstery: cotton fibre, palm fibre, flax fibre and horsehair. And of course metal springs, providing sensitive support for the back. With this kind of genuine upholstery you will have a chair that will wear in rather than wear out. This chair will be softer and even more comfortable with the use that is applied to it.
Initiating production of the frames in 1953, the Papa Bear Chair was the first Hans J. Wegner design to be produced at PP Møbler, and it marked the beginning of a life-long passionate collaboration involving generations of craftsmen and countless hours of work in the workshop developing prototypes and production techniques for numerous Wegner models. And yet the Papa Bear Chair remains the most exclusive piece of them all.
Son of a shoe-maker in southern Jutland, Hans Wegner, finished his formal training as a cabinetmaker with master cabinetmaker Stahlberg in 1930 before starting at Teknologisk Institut in Copenhagen. He soon moved to the School of Arts and Crafts in the Danish capital where he became architect in 1938, and started teaching in 1946.
In 1940 he joined Arne Jacobsen and Erik Møller in Arhus, to design the furniture for the new Arhus city hall. He started to work with 'minister' cabinetmaker Johannes Hansen in 1940 and showed his first furniture in the famous Hansen store on Bredgade 65 in 1941. Johannes Hansen was more than twice as old as the 26 year old Wegner but the unique collaboration between the two became the undisputed backbone of Danish furniture design and the main reason for it's world wide recognition in the fifties and sixties. The Copenhagen Museum of Art and Industry acquired the first Wegner chair in 1942.
In 1943 he started his own design office and 1 year later designed the first of a long series of 'chinese' chairs inspired by portraits of Danish merchants sitting in Ming chairs for Fritz Hansen. In 1950 Wegner designed the “Wishbone Chair” produced by Carl Hansen & Søn in Odense which became the most successful of all Wegner chairs. Most well known for it’s use by Kennedy and Nixon in their famous CBS TV debate of 1960.
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