DesignerDanish
Ib Kofod-Larsen
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Ib Kofod-Larsen was born on 6 May 1921 in Denmark and trained first as a cabinetmaker, completing his apprenticeship with distinction in 1944. He then enrolled at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1948. That same year he won both the Holmegaard Glass Competition and the Danish Cabinetmakers Guild's annual award - a double debut that immediately drew the attention of manufacturers and placed him among the emerging generation of Danish furniture architects.
His early collaboration with Faarup Møbelfabrik produced some of his most enduring storage pieces, including the Model FA33 sideboard in teak and the rosewood Model 66. These pieces reflected a clear design sensibility: an insistence on the natural grain and figure of the wood as a decorative element in itself, combined with clean structural lines derived from his architectural training. In 1956, working with the Swedish manufacturer OPE Möbler (Olof Persons Fåtöljindustri), he produced the Seal chair ("Sälen"), a low-slung lounge chair with a teak frame shaped around leather upholstery. Its organic profile and the way the frame curves to cradle the seat gave it an almost sculptural quality distinct from the more rectilinear work of some of his contemporaries.
Also in 1956, he designed the lounge chair originally designated Module U56, produced by Christensen & Larsen. When Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip acquired two of the chairs during an official visit to Denmark in 1958, the piece was renamed the Elizabeth Chair - a story that attached itself firmly to Kofod-Larsen's reputation and helped drive international interest. The Penguin chair (1953), named for the curved silhouette of its back, became one of Denmark's most frequently exported furniture pieces to the United States at the time, manufactured by Selig. Brdr. Petersen later began reissuing the design in 2012.
During the 1960s, Kofod-Larsen worked extensively with the British manufacturer G-Plan, designing a range of teak furniture for the UK export market. This gave his work wide distribution across Britain and added a layer of practical functionalism to his portfolio that sat alongside the more sculptural seating pieces. He was among a cohort of Danish designers - alongside Finn Juhl, Hans Wegner, and Arne Jacobsen - who together brought Scandinavian furniture to a global audience during the postwar decades, though his international profile has often been somewhat lower than those better-known names.
Kofod-Larsen died in 2003. On Auctionist, his 54 lots are dominated by chairs and armchairs (29 lots), with sideboards, tables, and cabinets making up the remainder, auctioned predominantly at Palsgaard Kunstauktioner and Scandinavian houses in Sweden and Denmark. The top recorded sale is 60,000 SEK for a pair of Seal/Sälen chairs at Bukowskis Stockholm. A pair of Model 4346 armchairs by Fritz Hansen reached 47,002 SEK, and a FA33 teak sideboard sold for 21,022 SEK. Original-production Seal chairs in teak and leather consistently attract the strongest prices in the Nordic market.