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The softness starts before the cushion
Sit beside a POÄNG and its profile tells much of the story. The wooden support travels down from the seat, curves towards the floor and returns beneath it. The back of the seat is not held up by an ordinary pair of rear legs. The frame participates in the chair’s movement.
In IKEA Museum’s portrait, Noboru Nakamura describes the U-shaped cantilever and the resilience of moulded plywood. A chair can therefore feel yielding even before thick upholstery enters the picture. The cushion softens contact with the body; the frame supplies another, quite different response.2
Before POÄNG there was POEM
The chair began as POEM in 1976. Nakamura had worked with Lars Engman on the project, drawing on an interest in Scandinavian furniture and ways of making a comfortable chair with relatively little material. The museum places the familiar 1977 catalogue cover in the catalogue released during 1976.1
Its account also supplies a wonderfully practical detail: frames, cushions and seat units came from different factories, and the chair reached customers in three parcels. The object people experienced as one armchair was organised as separate parts long before it occupied a sitting room.1
That distinction is visible in the finished design. The soft surface does not hide the whole structure. You can follow the wooden edge around the cushion and understand that each belongs to a different part of the assembly.
The wooden spring
The current birch-veneer frame uses layer-glued bent birch, which IKEA describes as resilient. Building up thin wood layers allows a curved structural member to have a shape that would be very different to cut from a straight plank.3
The long return along the floor matters to the visual reading. It makes the chair seem to reach forward and then fold back beneath itself. Seen from the side, there is open space where a conventional rear leg might have been. The effect is light without requiring the sitter to balance on an apparently fragile point.
Separating the cushion also changes the appearance of ownership. Fabric colour and texture can dominate the front view, while the wooden profile remains recognisable from the side. Two chairs can share the frame’s essential idea and still feel different in the same room.
A familiar name with a changing body
The museum dates the modernised POÄNG name to 1991. Nakamura’s later work also included a lower-backed version, eventually introduced in IKEA’s Nytillverkad collection. The family continued to change rather than treating the first version as untouchable.12
The lasting attraction is easy to bring back to the object. Look past the fabric and follow the curve of the support. A surprisingly large part of the chair’s identity is contained in that one travelling line: down, around and back under the person it carries.