Shoemaker Chair no. 49: A 1936 Workshop Stool, Remade in Oak

Form & Refine's Shoemaker Chair no. 49 is a low, three-legged oak stool whose carved seat traces back to 1936, when a shoemaker in Odense, Denmark shaped it simply by sitting on it — the same position, day after day, until the solid timber wore into a form that fit him. It has been in continuous production since, now hand-turned by the same family workshop that took it over in the 1970s.

A cobbler's stool, not a designer's brief

Most furniture people call "timeless" was drawn by someone with a name attached. The Shoemaker Chair wasn't designed at all, in that sense — it was worn into shape. The stool's low seat and slight forward lean suited a specific job: a shoemaker working at a bench, needing to lean in over his hands for hours without a backrest in the way. Over years of use, the solid wood seat is said to have taken on the contour of that posture, and the resulting shape — an anatomically curved perch rather than a flat disc — is what every version since has kept. It's a rare case of a chair's ergonomics being field-tested by exactly one very patient user, decades before anyone thought to sell it.

The Werner family takes it on

The design stayed a local, largely anonymous object until the 1970s, when a young cabinetmaker named Steen Werner acquired it and began producing it at the same standard of hand-craftsmanship as the original. Werner came from a line of wood turners — a trade that has mostly disappeared from furniture-making, where lathes now do in seconds what once took a trained hand years to learn. In 1999, Steen's son Lars Werner took over manufacturing, and the family has kept making it since, tightening the joinery and adjusting small details without changing the stool's basic shape. It's now in its second generation of Werner hands, which is a longer, quieter provenance chain than most furniture on the market can claim.

What Werner actually changed

The stool isn't a straight replica — Lars Werner has been specific about the two engineering changes his family made. A T-shaped connection was added between the three turned legs, bracing the structure so it holds up to daily use rather than the occasional sit a workshop stool got. And the seat itself was re-shaped, its top edge rounded off, for a practical reason Werner has stated plainly: if the stool falls over, a rounded edge won't chip or split the way a sharp one would. Each seat is still carved from a single piece of solid wood, and because grain and figuring vary piece to piece, no two Shoemaker Chairs finish exactly alike. The oak version goes through a three-step hand-oiling or staining process rather than a sprayed lacquer, which is why the surface reads as worked rather than coated.

Where Form & Refine fits

Form & Refine, the Copenhagen house founded in 2018 by Helle Herman Mortensen, Jonas Herman Pedersen and Lasse Lund Lauridsen, didn't design the Shoemaker Chair — its own furniture, like the Blueprint Chair and the A-Line series, comes from Herman Studio. What the house does with the Shoemaker Chair is bring a heritage, family-made object into a wider retail range under one name, alongside its own designs, without redrawing it. No. 49 is the standard stool height at 49 cm, sold in natural, white and smoked oak; a taller no. 68 counter-height version exists for kitchen benches and islands, sized for stool rather than table use.

Objena carries the Shoemaker Chair no. 49 in oak at AUD 1,320, and the taller no. 68 counter stool for AUD 1,490 — both made to the same Werner-family standard, not a reissue drawn from photographs. For the wider case on why Form & Refine's approach to sourcing and craft matters to us, our house chapter on Form & Refine covers the rest of the range.

Three questions

When was the Shoemaker Chair first made, and who designed it? The design dates to 1936, made in Odense, Denmark, by a local shoemaker whose own use of the stool is said to have shaped its seat. In the 1970s, young cabinetmaker Steen Werner acquired the design and began producing it to the same standard; his son Lars Werner took over manufacturing in 1999 and still makes it today. Form & Refine now brings the Werner-made stool to a wider market as no. 49, in solid oak.

Why is it called the "Shoemaker Chair"? Danish craft legend holds that the stool takes its name from a cobbler who sat on the same three-legged seat, in the same position, for years — slowly wearing the solid timber seat into a shape that fit him. Werner's version keeps that carved-seat logic, shaping each one from a single piece of wood, so no two are ever quite identical.

What's different about the no. 49 versus other Shoemaker Chair versions? Every version shares the same hand-carved seat and the turned-leg T-connection that Lars Werner added for stability. No. 49 is the standard stool height, 49 cm, in solid oak; Form & Refine also lists it in white and smoked oak, and a taller no. 68 counter-height stool for kitchen benches. All go through the same three-step hand-oiling or staining finish.