Hans Wegner designed furniture for everyman, but the American public took notice when two future U.S. presidents sat in his chairs on national television.

Danish furniture was the rage among cosmopolitan Americans in 1960 when Sen. John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard M. Nixon met in the first presidential campaign debate. The sight of the candidates seated in the TV studio in chairs designed by Wegner affirmed the arrival of Danish Modern in mainstream America.

Interiors magazine had proclaimed Wegner’s masterpiece “the world’s most beautiful chair” and featured it on a cover a decade earlier. Ever since its 1960 TV debut, the elegant classic has been called simply “The Chair.”

Wegner died Jan. 26, 2007 in Copenhagen. He was 92. The obituary in the New York Times, written by David Colman, stated that Wegner’s “Danish Modern furniture – most famously his chairs – helped change the course of design history in the 1950s and ’60s by sanding modernism’s sharp edges and giving aesthetes a comfortable seat.”

With more than 500 different chair designs to his credit, Wegner was the most prolific Danish designer. He took a sculptural and organic approach to furniture, combining high quality and traditional craftsmanship with modernist principles of simplicity and beauty.

Above all, Wegner’s chairs are as comfortable as they are beautiful.