A Four-Sided Pentagon Chair

At first, it’s difficult to tell from where Randers’s Pentagon Chair gets its name. The seat, a single piece of bent veneer, has four sides, not five. And it’s a graceful piece of Danish modern design—certainly not the type of furniture you’d expect to see at an American military headquarters. It turns out the name derives from the fabrication process: the ultra-thin veneer starts out as a five-sided shape with a keyhole cut from its center. The wood is then hand-bent—a process that requires four people—into its final curved form, the two outer edges joining together in a beautifully detailed zipper seam along the seat.

The chair came to the 60-year-old Danish company from one of its long-time clients, architect Hans Haugaard, who’d kept the design in his drawer for years. The company immediately snapped it up, although it took nearly 24 months to engineer the thickness of the wood so that it would be both thin enough to bend and strong enough to hold weight. This is Haugaard’s first furniture design. At ICFF, the chair is shown in oak with a satin chrome base, although it comes in several veneers, including zebrawood.