Carl Hansen CH24 Wishbone

A budget dining chair holds up for about four years. The foam flattens and the joints work loose. Then the whole set goes to the kerb and you buy it again. Over thirty years at one table that is six or seven chairs bought, used, and thrown away.

The object

The Carl Hansen CH24 Wishbone Chair answers that pattern with a single purchase. Hans Wegner drew it in 1949. Carl Hansen & Søn has built it in Denmark without a break since 1950. Each chair takes more than a hundred steps. The seat is woven by hand from over 120 metres of paper cord, about an hour of weaving for one chair. The frame is solid wood on doweled joints. The paper cord is the only part that ever wears. A weaver re-cords it when it does, decades in.

The arithmetic

That longevity is the whole financial case. The Wishbone in beech costs around €669 new. A used one in good condition sells for €400 to €550 on Marktplaats. The market for it is deep. Buy it once and thirty years later you are still sitting on a liquid asset. The cheap chair spends the same decades turning into landfill.

Here is the maths over thirty years at one seat.

The cash barely separates the two over three decades. What separates them is what you are left holding. One path ends with a Wegner chair worth several hundred euro and a resale market waiting for it. The other ends with seven chairs already in the bin.

The patina dividend

The Wishbone does not depreciate the way disposable furniture does. Owners keep them for a lifetime and hand them down. The paper cord softens and the wood warms with use. A good used example asks nearly what a new budget set costs. Depreciation is the tax the cheap chair pays every four years. The Wishbone escapes it.

Verdict. Buy the chair your grandchildren will fight over, for what a stack of throwaway chairs costs you anyway.