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Poul Volther
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Poul M. Volther (1923-2001) came to design through his hands rather than through theory. He trained first as a cabinetmaker, learning the behavior of wood grain and joinery before enrolling at the Arts and Crafts School in Copenhagen. That sequence - workshop before lecture hall - would define the logic of his practice for the next five decades.
In 1949 Hans Wegner brought Volther into the orbit of FDB Møbler, the Danish consumer cooperative that had tasked Børge Mogensen with raising the quality of everyday furniture. Volther worked alongside Mogensen, absorbing the cooperative's insistence that good design should be affordable and buildable at scale. When Mogensen left in 1955, Volther became FDB's design director, a post he held until 1959. During these years he produced a series of chairs for mass production, most notably the J46 (1956), a spoke-back kitchen chair that went on to sell roughly 850,000 units and remains one of the best-selling chairs in Danish design history.
The break from FDB led Volther toward more experimental territory. In 1961 he began sketching what would become the Corona chair, a design he brought to Erik Jørgensen's workshop in 1962. The chair's premise was architectural: a chromed steel spine rising from a swiveling base, with four independent oval cushions descending the frame like vertebrae. Each pad is upholstered separately, which allows the chair to wrap a seated body without relying on a rigid shell. Production began in 1964, and within a decade the Corona was appearing in hotel lobbies, embassies, and design collections across Europe. When the EU Summit was held in Copenhagen in 2002, the Corona was chosen as the official chair - a year after Volther's death.
Parallel to his studio practice, Volther taught at the Danish School of Arts and Crafts in Copenhagen, later incorporated into the Royal Danish Academy. His courses emphasized material knowledge and the relationship between a design's logic and its production constraints - the same concerns that had shaped his own training. The J46, the J48 (1951), and the EJ5 Corona are now held in the permanent collections of design museums across Scandinavia and beyond, and Fredericia Furniture reissued the Corona in the 2010s, introducing it to a new generation.
At auction, Volther's work appears primarily in Scandinavia, led by the Corona chair in its various configurations. On Auctionist, 30 items are recorded under his name, with the highest individual sale reaching around 14,700 SEK for a set of six lacquered chairs. The Corona armchairs (EJ5) from Erik Jørgensen are the most consistently traded pieces, typically settling between 6,500 and 8,000 SEK per chair in the Swedish market, with active listings spread across houses including Woxholt, Palsgaard, Helsingborgs Auktionskammare, and Bukowskis Stockholm.