Fritz Hansen × Ericsson

Announced September 14, 1956 at Den Permanente on Vesterbrogade, the 3160 began as a complaint. Gösta Thames, then finishing production work on the Ericofon in Stockholm, wrote to Jacobsen that the new telephone looked absurd on hall tables built for the heavy 1931 Bakelite set. Jacobsen's answer was not a table but a chair with the table grown out of it.

The seat is a shortened Ant shell, lowered at the back so a caller can twist sideways without catching an elbow. The Ant's single rear leg was thickened at the top into a cast junction, from which a chromed rod runs left to a shallow thermoplastic tray moulded at Ericsson's Midsommarkransen works. Its outline is traced from the Ericofon's side profile, so the telephone, standing in its round well, reads as the tray continuing upward. The tray is on the left because Thames had spent an afternoon watching callers at an Ericsson sales office: receiver in the left hand, pencil in the right. A right-hand version followed in 1957 for left-handed buyers; 140 were made.

The rear leg is drilled at top and foot and the cord runs inside it, a piece of exchange-room tidiness Thames insisted on so nobody would trip over it in a dark hallway. A slung plywood pocket under the seat takes one Copenhagen telephone directory and was sized, to the millimetre, to the 1956 KTAS edition. The 1957 edition was 9 mm thicker.

Mobilia gave it a double page. Politiken called it 'a chair that expects to be rung'. The difficulty was commercial: Danish subscribers rented their handsets from KTAS, which was slow to offer the Ericofon, so many Danish buyers owned a carefully shaped well and nothing to put in it. Sales through NK in Stockholm, where Televerket was already renting out Ericofons, kept the model going.