Certifying a Jens Risom arm chair--updated

Ain't she a beauty?

Back in 2005 or 2006, I was driving through my town in a cold rain and I went past a house where someone was moving out. There was a big heap of trash, but I saw this chair with some bright orange cushions. I pulled over, gave it a cursory inspection (Yes, it's a chair, not obviously falling apart) and put it in the back of the car.

The cushions were dirty, wet, and showing some wear. All in all, they grossed me out. I stood the chair in my garage, and in setting it down, it was clear to me that the sturdy frame was in very good condition.  I figured out how to remove the cushions, measured them, then hit eBay up for a funky fabric. I had a new project.

I found an upholsterer to fix the cushions up for a reasonable price, and I just beamed when it was ready. I really like this chair.

And oh! is it comfortable! It's a nice height. For a midcentury chair, it's very comfortable for anyone to sit in. Some MCM chairs are almost comically low. This was a chair designed to sit beside a desk or at a dining table. The broad, deep seat accommodates nearly every body's width and height. The arms are sturdy, and the feet stand very square on the floor, so even an elderly person who has some mobility issues can lean on this chair as she sits or rises.

The UNIVAC inventory sticker

The most curious thing I noticed about it right away, though, was the UNIVAC inventory sticker. That made me think for ten years that it was just some anonymous 1960s designer and manufacturer. Growing up in Aurora, IL, we had Lyon Metal and AllSteel Manufacturing, who made utilitarian items for workplaces. I've seen a lot of that sort of midcentury knockoff design. I noted this chair's untapered legs and spare ornamentation, and just figured it was something like an AllSteel chair, only made of wood.

Then last week, on a FaceBook Midcentury design group, someone posted an interior shot of a UNIVAC computer room (back when computers needed their own rooms), and I posted pictures of this chair. A comment suggested it "might be Risom" and I started a Google Image Search (GIS) for Risom armchairs and found an identical chair attributed to Jens Risom in the UK.  Well, that was good enough for me. 

Pay no attention to the mess in the background.

I noticed one of the times I had the chair upside-down that in the four corners of the underside, the braces have a maker's mark of a "B" inside a "G", inside a diamond. Huh. Who's that? I wondered. Back to Google. That led me to another conversation on designaddicts.com. While users there had posted some pictures of the mark, no one knew what it represented. We don't even know yet whether it says BG or GB.

Have I mentioned how much I love this chair?

However, user rtrindt had a chair just like mine (different fabric, of course). I said, "That's Risom" and provided the link to the UK site. User "leif erikson" said of my link, 'that's not definitive proof.' So we found some. User jkome found an old catalog of Risom's showroom with Knoll at Chicago's Merchandise Mart. In that picture, you can see a group of these chairs around a table. That's good, but it's not proof. 

Then another citation in jkome's next post shows several photos of a pair of these chairs. One of these photos is the paper tag on the underside, which state both "A Jens Risom Design" and "Risom Manufacturing Corp. North Grosvenordale, Conn." That proves it. This is a Jens Risom chair. Those two chairs in the 1stdibs posting are as described as teak, but I'm not so sure. Could be walnut, like mine.

Now to figure out who BG/GB is...

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2-14-16
I was watching Mad Men last night (the 2nd half of Season 7 was released recently on Netflix) when I saw two examples of this chair in a scene with Peggy. I was maybe a little too excited to have this validation about this chair, because, let's face it, Mad Men is largely a televised museum of MCM furnishings and textiles. Here's a screenshot. You can see the chairs with orange-red fabric behind Peggy as she walks off-camera.

A pair of Risom arm chairs (center) alongside the desks in Mad Men S7 E11.