Rare Finn Juhl Chair by Bovirke BO-118 in Shearling

*Price is for one chair*

Beautifully simple and visually dramatic, this chair show off Juhl at his best. Dramatic floating seat from all angles and curved teak arms that echo the Chieftain chair. Juhl was always exploring the limits of wood and joinery. He excelled in making pieces that have a lightness to them.

This incredible chair was designed in 1958, and executed by Bovirke, Denmark, model BO118. It has a Bovirke burn mark.

This chair have been restored and upholstered in shearling from Australia. Shearling has the unique benefit of staying cool in the summer and warm in the winter. The stamp under the chair is pictured. The seat has metal springs inside the frame makes the chair very comfortable to sit in.

This chair is the only known chair for sale in the world with solid teak arms. The chair had arms typically executed in teak plywood. An expert in Finn Juhl said "these are very rare chairs with an even rarer variation" He didn't know they existed.



Dimensions: 29"h x.29.50"w x 28"d

Seat: 15.50"h

About the Designer:

If one person can be credited with igniting the Scandinavian design movement that swept like wildfire across the United States in the 1950s and ’60s, it is Finn Juhl. Finn Juhl is considered to be one of the great masters of mid-20th-century Danish design. Among his cohort, which included HANS WEGNER, BØRGE MOGENSEN and OLE WANSCHER, Juhl was the only one untrained in cabinetry. This helps explain the distinctiveness of his designs, which are invariably described as more like sculpture than furniture. As he once acknowledged, “Art has always been my main source of inspiration.”

Juhl was the first among that group to have his work promoted overseas, bringing the character of the nation’s furnishings — and the inherent principles of grace, craftsmanship and utility on which they were based — to an international audience.

A stylistic maverick, Finn Juhl embraced expressive, free-flowing shapes in chair and sofa designs much earlier than his colleagues, yet even his quietest pieces incorporate supple, curving forms that are at once elegant and ergonomic.

As a young man, Juhl hoped to become an art historian, but his father steered him into a more practical course of study in architecture. He began designing furniture in the late 1930s, a discipline in which, despite his education, Juhl was self-taught, and quite proud of the fact. His earliest works, designed in the late 1930s, are perhaps his most idiosyncratic. The influence of contemporary art is clear in Juhl's 1939 Pelican chair: an almost Surrealist take on the classic wing chair. Critics reviled the piece, one said it looked like a "tired walrus." Juhl had tempered his creativity by 1945, when the Danish furniture-making firm Niels Vodder began to issue his designs. Yet his now-classic NV 45 armchair still demonstrates panache, with a seat that floats above the chair’s teak frame and beautifully flowing arms.

Juhl first exhibited his work in the United States in 1950, championed by Edgar Kaufmann Jr., an influential design critic and scion of America’s most prominent family of modern architecture and design patrons. (Kaufmann’s father commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright’s design of the house “Falling Water.”) Juhl quickly won a following for such signature designs as the supremely comfortable Chieftan lounge chair, the biomorphic Baker sofa, and the Judas table, a piece ornamented with stylish inlaid silver plaquettes.

In contrast to some of his function-conscious contemporaries, Juhl approached furniture design like a sculptor. Still, he never forgot its purpose. “Furniture is not created just to be looked at,” he once said. “People should be able to use a piece of furniture.”

In the modern era his designs have remained popular and widely collected. With some impressive auction results for his furniture, such as the record-setting £422,500 (then about $674,099) fetched by a superb example of his 1949 CHIEFTAIN CHAIR a few years back at Phillips London.