Fritz Hansen Furniture: How a Danish Maker Brought Modern Classics into Production

Behind every famous chair is a less famous question: how do you make thousands of them, all alike, all comfortable, all built to last? For more than 150 years the Danish company Fritz Hansen has been answering it. Fritz Hansen furniture has moved from a single cabinetmaker’s workshop in Copenhagen to steam-bent beech, moulded plywood and long partnerships with Denmark’s leading architects and designers. On day four of our Scandinavian Design Small Group Tour through Denmark, Sweden and Finland, the group drives north to visit the company in Allerød. This article follows the production story that brought it there.

From a Copenhagen workshop

The company dates its founding to 1872, when Fritz Hansen, a 25-year-old cabinetmaker trained in his home town of Nakskov on the island of Lolland, obtained his trade licence in Copenhagen. It was not yet a furniture brand in the modern sense. By the company’s own account, the first chair to carry the Fritz Hansen name dates from 1878, and in 1885 he opened a furniture production business in his own name, the point at which a craftsman’s licence became a manufacturing company.

The business grew steadily, and by the late 1880s its workshop in Christianshavn, the canal district across the harbour from central Copenhagen, was thriving. In 1896 Fritz Hansen bought land at Lillerød, in North Zealand, in what is now Allerød, and two years later he opened his own sawmill there, taking part of the work out of the crowded city. Allerød is still the company’s home. His son, Christian E. Hansen, took over in 1899, at the age of 25, when the company employed 50 people, and set it on the course that would define it: combining the standards of a cabinetmaker with the methods of a factory.

Its early reputation was built on public commissions. From 1905 the company made furniture for Copenhagen’s new Town Hall, working for Martin Nyrop, the architect who designed the building, and it also furnished the Danish Parliament and the Supreme Court, both housed in Christiansborg Palace on Slotsholmen, which the group visits on day three of the tour. Those projects established a pattern that continues today: architects designing for specific buildings, and Fritz Hansen turning their drawings into furniture that could be made well, in quantity.

Steam, beech and the company’s first bentwood chair

The technical turning point came soon after. In the first years of the twentieth century Christian E. Hansen began experimenting with steam bending, in which solid wood is softened with steam and bent around a form, and in 1915 the company introduced its first chair in steam-bent wood, making it one of the first Danish firms to do so. The appeal of the method is easy to see: a curved part bent from one piece of solid wood follows the grain along its length, so it can be both slender and strong, and the same form can be repeated again and again, which is exactly what a factory needs. In 1932 came the DAN chair, designed by Christian’s son Søren Hansen.

Through the 1930s the company refined these techniques at Allerød, and the knowledge it built up in bending and laminating wood made the mass production of plywood furniture possible later on. That expertise is the thread that links the company’s early bentwood chairs to the moulded-shell designs that made it internationally known after the Second World War. The next generation was already in place: Christian’s sons Poul and Søren had joined the business in 1928 and became co-owners in 1933, Poul running the factory and Søren the administration.

Working with architects and designers

The company’s great strength has been its partnerships. In 1934 it began a partnership with Arne Jacobsen, whose approach to furniture as part of a total design we explore in a separate article. In 1936 it launched Kaare Klint’s Church Chair, which remained in the collection until 2004. In 1944 it produced Hans J. Wegner’s China Chair. Børge Mogensen’s Spoke-back sofa, designed in 1945 for the Copenhagen Cabinetmakers’ Guild exhibition, was put into production by Fritz Hansen in 1963, an example of how a design first shown as a cabinetmaker’s prototype could later become an industrial product.

These names matter because they show the range of the partnership. Klint founded the furniture school at the Royal Danish Academy, where Mogensen was one of his students; Wegner, a trained cabinetmaker, came instead through the School of Arts and Crafts; and Jacobsen, an architect first, pushed the company towards industry. Between them they span the main strands of Danish design’s blend of craft and function. Fritz Hansen’s role was to make each of them manufacturable without losing what made the design worth making.

Fritz Hansen furniture as an industrial product

The post-war years turned the company’s technical experience into lasting products. Arne Jacobsen’s Ant chair of 1952, the Series 7 of 1955, the Grand Prix chair of 1957 and the Swan and Egg chairs of 1958, designed for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, were all produced by Fritz Hansen. The plywood chairs built on the company’s long experience of bending and pressing wood, while the Swan and Egg, with their upholstered curved shells, took it into a different kind of making.

The factory grew to match. Three new factory halls were added at Allerød in 1963, and in 1965 the administration moved there from Christianshavn, bringing the whole company to one site. In 1968 came the Superellipse table, based on the work of the Danish designer Piet Hein and also credited to the Swedish designer Bruno Mathsson and to Arne Jacobsen.

New owners and new designers

In 1979 the founding family sold 75 percent of the company to Skandinavisk Holding. Today it belongs to Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker, an investment company owned by the Augustinus Foundation. In 1982 the company acquired the rights to a major part of the work of Poul Kjærholm, whose steel-and-leather designs stand somewhat apart from the wooden tradition. It later gave up part of that collection, before acquiring his complete works again in 2014.

In 1999 the company inaugurated a new factory at Vassingerød, on the edge of Allerød, with a showroom and museum open to visitors. In 2012 it announced that its remaining Danish production would move abroad, mainly to Poland, where the Egg and the Swan were already being made, while design, administration and the archive stayed in Allerød. The partnership model continued with a new generation of designers: Kasper Salto’s Ice chair of 2002, Piero Lissoni’s sofa first introduced in 2006, Cecilie Manz’s Essay table of 2009 and Jaime Hayon’s Ro chair, unveiled in Milan in 2013.

The company marked its 150th anniversary in 2022 with a presentation during the 3 Days of Design festival at Designmuseum Denmark in Copenhagen. Alongside new editions of the Series 7 and reissues of Jacobsen’s Egg, Swan and Lily chairs, it presented two Kjærholm designs from 1952: the PK60 table, released for the first time, and the PK0 A chair, previously made only in very small numbers. It was a fitting way to show how a manufacturer’s archive can still hold unfinished stories.

How a design moves into, out of and back into production

Fritz Hansen’s history also shows that a design’s life does not end when it leaves the drawing board. Some pieces wait years for the right moment. Mogensen’s Spoke-back sofa was shown as a cabinetmaker’s prototype in 1945 and reached Fritz Hansen’s production line only in 1963. Kjærholm’s PK60 table waited seventy years, from 1952 to 2022, for its first release.

Others enjoy very long runs. Klint’s Church Chair stayed in the collection from 1936 to 2004, almost seventy years, and Jacobsen’s chairs from the 1950s are still being made in new editions. Some return after a pause, as the Egg, Swan and Lily did in the anniversary reissues of 2022. And rights can change hands, as the company’s on-and-off relationship with the Kjærholm collection between 1982 and 2014 shows.

For a manufacturer, each of these decisions is a judgement about materials, tooling, demand and how faithfully a design can be reproduced. That is the part of the design story a museum case cannot show. A chair in a gallery is a finished object; for the company that makes it, the same chair is a set of choices about wood, steel, fabric and method that have to be made again with every edition. Hearing how those choices are made is one of the rewards of meeting a maker rather than only seeing its products.

Visiting Fritz Hansen on the tour

The visit takes up the morning of day four. When Monocle visited in 2023, it described the headquarters as a glass-and-concrete building that was once the company’s factory, set beside a forest of birch and pine. From Allerød the group returns to Copenhagen for lunch at Restaurant Paustian, then visits Paustians Hus, the waterfront furniture showroom designed by Jørn Utzon and completed in 1987, and pauses at Superkilen, the public park in Nørrebro, on the way back to the hotel. On day five the group visits the showroom of the Danish textile maker Kvadrat and then the Danish Museum of Art & Design, the same Designmuseum Denmark where the company presented its 150th anniversary collection in 2022, so the story of a single maker can be set against the wider collections of Danish design.

How far is Allerød from Copenhagen?

About an hour by road, according to the tour itinerary. The group makes the trip on the morning of day four and is back in Copenhagen for lunch, so the visit does not take up the whole day.

Can visitors see the Fritz Hansen archive?

Only by appointment. The company’s headquarters houses the Design Hall, which held about 350 historic pieces when Monocle reported on it in 2023, and Monocle described access as by appointment rather than open to walk-in visitors. If seeing it matters to you, ask our Tour Specialists before you travel, as it is not a guaranteed part of the day-four program.

Is the Fritz Hansen visit included in the tour?

Yes. The tour includes all excursions, entrance fees and local guides, and lunch on day four is included as well. Nothing needs to be booked separately.

Beyond Allerød

Fritz Hansen is one maker on a much longer route. Our learning-led guide to Scandinavian design places it beside the glassworks, textile schools and architects of Sweden and Finland that the tour visits later. For the country’s deeper past, our Viking-age history of Denmark and Scandinavia starts long before the first cabinetmakers, and our Denmark travel questions answered deals with practical matters such as language and when to travel. The Danish idea of comfort often linked with its furniture is explored in Denmark’s very own brand of cosiness.

It is easy to admire a classic chair without thinking about how it was made. Fritz Hansen’s history is a reminder that Danish design’s reputation rests as much on manufacturers as on designers: on the people who learned to bend beech, press plywood and upholster a curved shell, and who turned a designer’s drawing into something thousands of people could live with. Seeing the company in Allerød, and the buildings and museums of Copenhagen around it, puts that partnership at the centre of the story.