Pair of Alfred Christensen style 1950s Armchairs

Pair of Alfred Christensen Style 1950s Armchairs

Each chair of organic, gently sculptural form, the generously proportioned seat and back upholstered in a finely textured cream bouclé of recent date, the cushioned seat of ample depth and the back rising to a softly rounded apex — a silhouette that speaks equally of comfort and considered design. The open armrests formed from beach, each sweeping in a single uninterrupted curve from the back uprights to a rounded terminal above the front legs, the timber bleached to a warm ash-grey tone. The whole raised on four splayed tapering legs of square section, angled outward in a manner typical of the best Scandinavian workshop practice of the period.

The pair belongs firmly within the Nordic humanist tradition of the early postwar decades, a movement that sought to reconcile modernist principles of form and function with the warmth of natural materials and the enduring craft traditions of Scandinavia. Their closest affinities lie with the work of the great Danish and Swedish ateliers of the 1950s — the circle of designers who orbited Fritz Hansen, Dux, and the Danish cabinetmakers' guild exhibitions — in which the curved wooden armrest serving as a unifying gesture between frame and upholstery was a recurring and much-admired device. The present chairs, freshly upholstered in a quality ivory bouclé entirely sympathetic to their period character, are presented in excellent and immediately usable condition.