Collection: Nanna Ditzel

Nanna Ditzel - The Most Fearless Designer in the Danish Modern Tradition

At Deszine Talks, the Nanna Ditzel collection stands apart. Where the Danish modern tradition is most often characterised by restraint by the careful subordination of form to function, by the suppression of the decorative impulse in favour of structural honesty Ditzel (1923–2005) represented something genuinely different: a designer of the same rigorous Danish formation who chose to let form lead, who trusted colour and scale and organic geometry in ways that her contemporaries rarely did, and who produced a body of work that is simultaneously among the most distinctively personal and the most universally appealing in the entire Scandinavian design canon.

Born in Copenhagen in 1923, Nanna Ditzel trained at the Copenhagen School of Arts and Crafts and subsequently at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts the same institutions that formed Wegner, Jacobsen, and Mogensen. But where those designers moved primarily into furniture in solid wood and metal, Ditzel’s practice ranged freely across furniture, textiles, jewellery, and exhibition design, and her furniture specifically engaged with materials rattan, moulded fibreglass, wicker, rope, and later powder-coated steel that her contemporaries largely ignored. This breadth was not restlessness; it was the expression of a formal curiosity that found different materials to be differently capable of producing the organic, body-responsive forms that interested her most.

Her early career was shaped by her partnership with her husband Jørgen Ditzel, with whom she collaborated until his death in 1961. Their joint practice produced some of the most celebrated furniture of the 1950s, including the first suspended hanging chair the piece that would later be known as the Hanging Chair or the “Egg of Columbus” which appeared in 1959 and was so formally unexpected that it redefined what a chair could be. After Jørgen’s death, Nanna continued her practice independently, spending periods in England working in graphic and exhibition design before returning to Denmark and resuming furniture work with renewed formal confidence. Her later career produced some of her most enduring pieces, including the Trinidad Chair (1993) and the Bench for Two (1989).

Ditzel received the Lunning Prize in 1956 the most prestigious award in Scandinavian design at that time, shared that year with Finn Juhl and the Danish Design Council’s lifetime achievement award in 1999. She was, by any measure, one of the most significant figures in the post-war Danish design tradition, and the only one whose work consistently challenged the formal conservatism of that tradition from within rather than against it. Her pieces are not rebellions against Danish modernism; they are its most adventurous possibility.

Signature Pieces in This Collection

• Hanging Chair - The Egg of Columbus (1959) - The most radical piece of furniture produced anywhere in the world in the 1950s, the Hanging Chair suspends its occupant from a ceiling hook in a woven rattan or cane egg-shaped shell, eliminating the conventional relationship between chair and floor entirely. The concept is so simple and so unexpected that it is almost impossible to explain why no one had done it before. The name “Egg of Columbus” refers to the apocryphal story of Columbus demonstrating the obvious in retrospect a thing that seems self-evident once done but that no one thought to do first. The chair’s woven shell creates a microenvironment of enveloping warmth and gentle movement; the occupant is simultaneously supported, enclosed, and in gentle perpetual motion. Produced by Sika-Design in natural rattan or in painted finishes, it remains one of the most frequently imitated and never equalled pieces in the history of furniture. An installation centrepiece in any interior that can accommodate its spatial requirements.
• Trinidad Chair (1993) - Designed for the Trinidad island of Frederiksted’s historic square and produced by Fredericia Furniture, the Trinidad is the piece that brought Ditzel’s work to its widest international audience. Its powder-coated steel frame and distinctive back a pattern of circular perforations that creates a visual openness and a formal complexity simultaneously is one of the most recognisable chair profiles of the late 20th century. The perforated back is not merely decorative: it reduces the visual weight of the steel, allows air circulation behind the sitter’s back, and creates a play of light and shadow through the chair that changes with every shift in ambient illumination. Available in a wide range of powder-coat colours, the Trinidad is equally effective indoors and outdoors and is as visually dynamic in a contemporary café or restaurant as in a private dining room.
• Bench for Two (1989) - One of the most witty and formally resolved pieces in the entire Danish modern canon, the Bench for Two is a solid wood bench whose seat is shaped as a gentle double saddle two curved depressions that guide two sitters into a naturally facing-outward posture, side by side but each slightly turned away from the other. The design acknowledges the social reality of shared seating: that two people on a bench are rarely in identical postures, and that a bench shaped only for one position is a bench that fails half its users. The curved seat profile is hand-shaped from solid wood and is immediately comfortable in the sitting position it encourages. It is also, in its quiet way, one of the most humanly perceptive pieces of furniture ever made.
• Ring Chair (1958) - A rattan easy chair of circular form the seat and back forming a continuous ring produced by Wengler and later Sika-Design. The Ring Chair predates the Hanging Chair by one year and represents the same investigation of what rattan, as a material, can enable that wood or steel cannot: a continuous curved form of generous enclosure that would be impossibly heavy or structurally problematic in solid wood, but that rattan achieves with structural economy and visual lightness. A defining piece of the mid-century rattan revival.
• Cushions & Accessories - Fabric and natural-fibre cushions selected to complement the organic rattan and woven forms of Ditzel’s pieces adding colour, warmth, and tactile contrast without competing with the formal boldness of each design.

Form That Begins With the Body, Not the Blueprint

The quality that distinguishes Ditzel’s furniture from that of her Danish contemporaries is the directness of its relationship to the body. Where Wegner began with joinery and arrived at comfort, and where Mogensen began with function and arrived at form, Ditzel began with the experience of sitting  the sensory reality of enclosure, warmth, movement, and rest and found forms that produced those experiences as directly as possible. The Hanging Chair encloses and moves; the Bench for Two guides and accommodates; the Ring Chair encircles and holds. Each piece is legible as an experience before it is legible as an object.

This approach led Ditzel to materials that her contemporaries underused. Rattan is strong, light, flexible, and capable of being woven into three-dimensional forms of considerable structural complexity properties that a designer thinking from form rather than from material convention would naturally exploit. Powder-coated steel, used in the Trinidad, is equally capable: its structural slenderness allows the perforated back to be thin, light, and visually open in a way that solid wood or cast metal could not achieve. Ditzel used materials for what they could do, not for what they were conventionally expected to do.

The result is furniture that is simultaneously more formally adventurous and more physically inviting than almost anything else in the Danish modern tradition pieces that attract the eye before they are understood and reward sustained habitation after they have been sat in for the first time.

Why Deszine Talks for Nanna Ditzel?

How to Style Nanna Ditzel in Your Interior

The Hanging Chair is a spatial centrepiece that needs at minimum 2.5m of ceiling height and 1.5m of unobstructed floor radius to be read correctly a double-height entrance hall, a garden room, or an open-plan living space with exposed structural ceiling are ideal contexts. Suspend it near a window to take advantage of natural light falling through the woven rattan shell. Below it, ground the composition with a circular Carpet in a warm natural tone that echoes the rattan’s colour.

The Bench for Two works at an entrance, a bedroom foot, or as a punctuation point in a corridor or gallery space anywhere that two people might pause together. Pair it with a Mirror above for an entrance arrangement of particular warmth. The Trinidad Chair in multiples is exceptional around a dining surface or in a terrace setting, where its perforated back creates an ever-changing light pattern as the day progresses. Add Fabric Cushions for seasonal softness alongside the Ring Chair, and complete any Ditzel arrangement with a Sofa in a grounded neutral leather to provide visual ballast against the formal expressiveness of her pieces.

Explore More Danish & Scandinavian Design Icons

Nanna Ditzel’s playful organic authority finds natural counterpoints across our designer collections. The shell mastery of Arne Jacobsen whose Egg and Swan belong to the same decade of formal ambition as Ditzel’s Hanging Chair is explored in its own collection. The structural rigour of Børge Mogensen and the handcraft authority of Hans J. Wegner represent the more disciplined poles of the same Danish tradition. The Klint-rooted functionalism of Jørgen Bækmark offers the most principled counterpoint to Ditzel’s formal freedom. For the full breadth of what we curate, begin with our Furniture collection, or let our customers lead you through our Best Sellers cohesive, considered, lasting.