The Egg chair was always more suited to hotel lobbies than home livingrooms

Maybe it’s lost in translation from the Danish, but Arne Jacobsen’s famous “Egg” chair doesn’t immediately scream “ovum” – oval, yes, the way the back curves into the seat and the sides wrap around, but not the full egg.

An architect, Jacobsen is famous for very many chair designs and for being part of the “Danish modern” movement, an integral element in the wave of Scandinavian designers who had such an impact, particularly on furniture design in Europe and the US in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Egg was designed for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen (now renamed the Radisson Blu Royal Hotel) a hotel that is sometimes called the first “designer” hotel in that Jacobsen designed everything from the building right down to the cutlery.

The 20-storey hotel was controversial from the start, not because of the furniture but because it was at the time the tallest building in Copenhagen. Its critics regarded it as too like a New York skyscraper for Danish comfort, although the curvy sculptural Egg chair, originally in a fresh forest-green colour, was a warm and welcome contrast to the austere concrete, glass and steel exterior of the hotel. But for all its appealing curviness, there is something that screams “hotel lobby” or “high-end office” about the Egg. A favourite with mid-century modern fans, it still looks more comfortable in a commercial setting than a domestic one – possibly because of its size and materials.

The moulded fibreglass upholstered frame sits on a shiny four-star aluminium base – that nod to the industrial that so appealed to the modernists. For comfort there is an adjustable tilt lever on it – something that knock-offs, of which there are many, sometimes don’t manage. The original Egg is still made – as it has been since the 1950s – by Danish company Fritz Hansen. In reality, though, it should have been called something less eggy and, as establishment as it sounds, a name more owing to its wing-back antecedents. With its winged sides the Egg recalls much earlier fireside chairs from the 18th century with sides at head-level so they protected the sitter from draughts.