Welcome to back to Extended Stays, a two-part Hotels Week series highlighting furnishings that have endured beyond their original purpose: for use in a hotel. Part 1: The Martinique wallpaper from the Beverly Hills Hotel.



Long before Gehry's bashed-in sardine can in the Spanish countryside or Robert A.M. Stern's replica Old West at Disneyland Paris there was Copenhagen's SAS Royal Hotel, the original of the starchitect-hotel set. Designed by Arne Jacobsen in the 1950s, the hotel, now a Radisson Blu, also served as a laboratory for the Danish architect's furniture and product designs, and his elegant Swan and Egg chairs are the two most famous pieces to emerge from the concrete-and-aluminum tower. "In an era when hotels are trying desperately to look like someone's living room, it's funny to think that two chairs, designed in 1956 for a hotel in Copenhagen, are now residential staples the world over," writes Kelsey Keith, special projects editor at Dwell, by email. "It helps that the designer was Arne Jacobsen, one of the most influential of the midcentury Danish clique, and that the upholstered chairs—the Swan and the Egg—transmit the idea of hygge so readily. That particularly Danish brand of cozy modernism resonates in what is now widely known as 'modern' design, from the curvy, organic silhouettes of the Brazilians to the optimistic yet rational quality of Americans like George Nelson and the Eameses." Today those chairs are a point of pride for the Radisson Blu—you'll find them in every branch of the hotel chain, as well as the utterly fabulous private homes below.

· All Hotels Week 2014 posts [Curbed National]