When Choosing Chairs, Take Your Office Attitude Home With You

While comfort is clearly his priority, Stumpf acknowledged that people choose furniture that's uncomfortable for all sorts of reasons, including religion, philosophy and historical authenticity. A good example is Shaker furniture. With its straight backs and hard seats, its austerity reflected the Shaker principles of asceticism and celibacy, and it continues to be popular because many people like its simple elegance. But in truth, Stumpf said, "The furniture is wildly uncomfortable. You have to be a Shaker to like it. You practically have to wear a back brace to sit in it for longer than 10 minutes."

Some traditional chairs do have great ergonomics, however. A good example, but one that Stumpf rarely sees in houses today, is a rocking chair. It provides excellent lumbar support while taking the weight off the base of your spine. If you have a place to put your feet up, and your rocker seat is padded, the comfort is very similar to what you get in a La-Z-Boy, he said, but it's better because the slight rocking movement produced when you "pump a bit" helps move blood from your legs back to your torso.

In putting individual pieces together in a room, "conversation scale" becomes a comfort issue, Stumpf said. When you are talking with another person, you will feel uncomfortable if you are more than three or four feet from him. This is rarely an issue, except in large houses. The furniture tends to be bigger to look right in the big rooms, but this can mean that people sit too far apart to easily converse.

With dining, Stumpf said, the comfort of the chair will affect how long you want to linger at the table and the ambience of your dinner parties. The more comfortable the chair, the more relaxed you feel, and the longer you will sit. But, when the seat is too hard, the back is too straight or the seat is too high and your feet are not resting comfortably on the floor, you won't sit long. If your dining chairs have one of these characteristics, Stumpf said, "You might as well open your front door to your dinner guests and say, 'Welcome to our house and you'll be uncomfortable.' "

Stumpf also spoke about multipurpose chairs and portability. A chair can be multipurpose if it is designed to be used for several different tasks in the same spot. It can also be multipurpose if it is used for similar tasks but is easily moved to other places in a house. The obvious advantage of portability is that you don't need to buy so much furniture. This was the central idea behind Stumpf's Caper chair, his most recent project with furniture manufacturer Herman Miller. The polyurethane chair is so light you can easily pick it up with one hand. It weighs only nine pounds (12 pounds with the casters) and comes in several bright colors.

As his first office chair looked different, so does the Caper chair. It's unlike any household chair that you have ever seen, but it's also another perfect example of why you should try a chair before making a judgment. I can attest that once you sit in the Caper, you realize that it's a perfect fit for the many tasks performed at a kitchen table and other places in the house, and you wonder why no one thought of it before.

Katherine Salant's e-mail address iskatherine@katherinesalant.com.

© 2005, Katherine Salant

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