Carl Hansen CH24 Wishbone Chair

The CH24 is a wooden dining chair with a low, curved back. A single steam-bent rail sweeps round from one side to the other and serves as both backrest and armrests, carried on rear legs that bend upwards to meet it. In the middle a flat splat, split into a Y, supports the rail, which gives the chair its two names, the Wishbone and the Y Chair. The seat is paper cord, woven by hand in an envelope pattern of four triangles, set on four straight, turned legs.

Hans J. Wegner drew the chair in 1949, in his first weeks with the Funen firm Carl Hansen & Søn, as one of four chairs designed together. It descends from his Chinese Chairs of the mid-1940s, which took their round backs from chairs of Ming China. Holger Hansen was unconvinced at first, and his factory could not make all of it: the rear legs had to be turned and the top rail bent by outside workshops. All four chairs went into production in 1950.

The Wishbone became the most successful chair of Wegner's long career and one of the best-known objects of Danish modern design, found in restaurants, hotels and homes around the world. It sells especially well in Japan, which buys more than a quarter of each year's output, and where a whole book has been written about it.

Carl Hansen & Søn has made the chair since 1950 without a break, through the decline of Danish furniture in the 1970s and its revival in the 1990s. The seat was raised two centimetres in the mid-1990s for taller buyers, though the original height is still sold in Asia. Otherwise the chair has kept its form, in oak, beech, walnut and painted finishes. The maker says each one still takes more than a hundred steps, and an hour of hand weaving for the seat.