The Chieftain Chair is probably the most well-known of all Finn Juhl’s chairs—a powerful design that not only dominates in size and extravagance but also requires ample space around it to do itself justice. In true and proper fashion, it is a chieftain. With good reason, it has been called an icon of Danish furniture design.
However, Finn Juhl was quite modest about the development process of the chair and did not have any expectations of its greatness. He said:
“I started drawing the Chieftain Chair one day in the spring of 1949. I was at home, and I started drawing a small sketch around 10 AM with just four vertical lines connected with something. By two or three o’clock in the morning, I had painted it. But in reality, I don’t know how long it took me to design that chair. Perhaps I had a vague idea for some time that I wanted to design something bigger. There had been so many small, handy chairs, so I probably felt like designing something a bit more pompous…”
