This is the most static and classic of all Wegner’s chairs. Its frame is strictly geometrical and the armrests embrace the person seated while the gracious backrest provides state of the art comfort.
The Captain’s Chair was created as a statement of an essential Wegner chair. It includes the virtues that were characteristic for the flourishing friendship between Wegner, Ejnar Pedersen and the staff of PP Møbler.
The Captain’s Chair combines a length of steam bent wood with two pieces of solid wood cut from a 2½ inch plank in line of one another and paired. This sophisticated construction provides a comfort similar to that of the Round Chair but is not quite as demanding in terms of the size of the timber.
The steam bent and the solid parts are visually divided by a piece of contrasting veneer and the two pieces of solid wood in the back are connected with contrasting wood tenons. Common with the Cow Horn, Bull and Minimal Chairs, the construction of the Captain’s Chair is extremely difficult to execute, there is no room for error, the joints have to be perfect every time.
This chair was not designed with ferries in mind but in 1978 more than 600 special versions of the pp52 chair were delivered to the DFDS ferry ‘Dana Anglia’ which was to sail between Denmark and England.
In 1982 a customer turned up with one of the special versions exclusively made for the ferry with its seat missing. Obviously lost at sea, he found it one morning on a beach on the west coast of Denmark. The customer got a new seat. The chair itself was completely intact.
More than 40 years after the ferry’s maiden voyage it has been renamed and upgraded several times and has sailed on a number of different routes within Denmark, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Norway, Sweden and Italy. Through all the years, the chairs have remained on board!