Dezeen’s A-Zdvent calendar: Ovalia Egg Chair by Henrik Thor-Larsen

He then designed the seats for auto brand Saab’s Sonett model, before turning his attention to industrial design. Ovalia was originally exhibited at the Scandinavian Furniture Fair in 1968 and was sold worldwide for a decade until production stopped in 1978. «Apart from a few improvements, there have been no visible changes to the design.»
The chair’s creator, Henrik Thor-Larsen, originally built plastic chassis for racing cars. Each Ovalia Egg Chair comes with a Sterling silver medallion, and is signed and numbered by the designer. The fabric is available in more than twenty tones, while the circular base on which the seat rotates comes in painted or polished aluminium. Another Danish designer to name a product Egg Chair was Arne Jacobsen, whose seat for the SAS hotel in Copenhagen came 10 year’s before Thor-Larsen’s design but was only ever intended as a limited edition. Danish designer Henrik Thor-Larsen’s retro-futuristic 1968 Ovalia Egg Chair is the 15th iconic seat design in our Christmas countdown this year. «Ovalia is a classic furniture design,» said the product’s official website. «A chair with a lot of attitude.»
The design comprises an egg-shaped reinforced fibreglass shell, painted glossy white, with a portion removed from the front. Dezeen is publishing an A to Z of   iconic chairs to count down the days until Christmas. It regained prominence more recently when it was used in a number of scenes in the 1997 film Men in Black. The Garden Egg Chair by Peter Ghyczy   also features in our A-Zdvent calendar as the letter G. For the movie’s 2002 sequel, promotional posters showed actors Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones sat in matching versions of the design.