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The 3107 Chair

It takes nine sheets of veneer, two layers of cotton backing, up to five coats of paint, and 11 days to make a 3107 chair. We take you to the floor of Fritz Hansen's stackable-chair factory to show you how it's done.

The most famous photo of Arne Jacobsen’s 3107 chair isn’t even of a real 3107. The iconic image, taken by Lewis Morley in 1963, depicts British knockout Christine Keeler naked astride a knockoff. The provocative pic propelled the molded-plywood chair to international fame, and sales—which had inched forward at a snail’s pace after the chair’s 1955 release—skyrocketed. Today, the company has sold nearly seven million Series 7 chairs, including the 3107, the dining-height model, making it Danish furniture manufacturer Fritz Hansen’s best-selling family of seats.

3107 chair hansen franz sheets of outer veneer cut portrait

Prep the Veneer

In the idyllic Danish countryside, 15 miles northwest of Copenhagen, autonomous robots transport pallets of veneer down the aisles of Fritz Hansen’s 161,000-square-foot chair factory. Nearby, human workers inspect each of the over 400,000 chairs made here annually, half of which are Series 7 chairs, with the 3107 model at its forefront.

Precut 22-by-33.5-inch sheets of .04-to-.05-inch-thick inner veneer arrive at the factory from mills in France and Germany that have reforestation programs. The outer veneers are ordered from the same mills, but with a custom request passed down directly from Jacobsen. “He made it difficult for us,” explains Thomas Touborg, Fritz Hansen’s executive vice president of supply chain. “He decided the outside wood should be .03 inches thick and the world standard is .02 inches.”

The sheets of outer veneer are cut into 4.5- and 5.5-inch-wide strips, as Jacobsen also specified. They are then run through a machine that glues pieces of alternating widths together by their edges. A thin piece of cotton is adhered to each reconstructed 22-by-33.5-inch sheet for durability.

Next, an employee clamps three hearty handfuls of stacked veneers at a time into a stencil and cuts them into rough versions of their final shapes using a band saw. (The scraps are sold to factories equipped with wood-burning furnaces capable of filtering out the toxins from the glue.)

3107 chair hansen franz veneer glazed with adhesive portrait

Glue and Mold

A worker then places single layers of inner veneer on a conveyor belt that sends them through what looks like a doughnut-glazing machine, coating both sides of the veneer with a white liquid adhesive.

At the other end, the veneers are stacked into nine-sheet piles: a cotton-backed outer layer, four glue-covered sheets sandwiching three dry sheets, and another cotton-backed outer layer on top. These loosely stacked piles are rolled down another conveyor belt where a third man—–nearly all of the factory employees are men—–places them into the most impressive equipment on the site: the Sennerskov hydraulic form presses.

Here, at 253 degrees Fahrenheit and under 94 tons of pressure, the nine layers of veneer and two sheets of cotton become one piece of molded plywood. After two minutes in the presses, the forms are removed and placed in a drying area, where they sit for five days until the plywood has stabilized.

 

3107 chair hansen franz cnc machine cuts forms

Cut and Sand

Once the plywood has hardened, a worker wearing sound-suppressing earmuffs places the pieces, three at a time, into the factory’s computer numerically controlled (CNC) machine. The milling machine cuts the signature Series 7 silhouette into the molded forms—–though by simply changing which pattern is selected, the machine can also create Jacobsen’s Ant or Lily chairs from the same pieces of molded plywood.

The newly cut chairs are sent in stacks to skilled craftsmen, who hand-sand and inspect each seat. Quality is carefully controlled, and if there are any imperfections, the chair is cut in half and thrown away. “Few people buy our chairs just to sit on them; they’re way too expensive and highly designed,” says Jacob Holm, president and CEO of Fritz Hansen. The reason Danes of all classes purchase the pricey product is cultural: “It’s very dark in Denmark in the winter so we need to have beautiful homes,” Holm says.

In a caged-off area near the craftsmen, a machine attaches plastic discs—–onto which the legs are later mounted—–to the undersides of the seats using ultraviolet light–cured glue. Five seconds after the discs are stuck on, the machine tries to tear them off with over 1,320 pounds of force. If the disc stays put, it’ll stay there for life, Touborg says.

3107 chair hansen franz chairs packed shipped portrait

Paint and Ship

The discs also serve as hooks for hanging the chairs upside down on a conveyor belt that leads them to a glassed-in room. There, a robotic arm paints the curved surfaces with polyurethane paint. Two layers are applied if the customer wants to be able to see the wood grain through the paint, four to five layers for an opaque finish.

After each layer is applied, the chairs spend 2.5 hours in a hardening oven then rest for another 16 hours. When the final coat of paint has dried, workers manually attach the legs to the underside discs. Though Fritz Hansen used to make the chrome legs, it now purchases them from a manufacturer in Sweden. “It’s cheaper and of better quality to buy them from specialists,” Touborg says. Eleven days after the process began, the finished chairs—–in orders ranging from just one to dozens—–are boxed. The labels are addressed to cities around the world from the “Republic of Fritz Hansen.”

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