Does a Chair Need to Be Comfortable?
Also, has La-Z-Boy been misunderstood? We asked a few experts.
By Megan C. Reynolds
There’s a chair in the den at my father’s house that, to me, is perfect. It is large, red, and assertive, and bears a passing resemblance to Jindřich Halabala’s slutty little Art Deco armchairs for Thonet. The generous arms can accommodate a stack of books, my large water bottle, and a flotilla of TV remotes that you’ll find in a Boomer household. To sit in it is to feel enveloped. Nothing hurts or feels bad. When I tire of being upright, the chair meets me where I am: With a bit of casual effort, I can lean back, and the chair will splay me out—almost like I’m sitting in my second favorite seat, a zero-gravity lounger I found in the garden shed in my father’s backyard.
I love the TV chair so much that I’ve spent a fair amount of time looking for one of my own. I was shocked, but only briefly, to discover that it isn’t some sort of lesser-known midcentury-ish, dupe-y relic—it’s a La-Z-Boy, specifically this one, a pushback recliner designed for an upscale interior that prioritizes both comfort and style.
You can imagine my surprise: In my mind, a La-Z-Boy is a chair designed for watching football and eating Chili Cheese Fritos, probably in the rec room of an overstuffed McMansion. Its slightly worldlier cousin, a midcentury-adjacent lounge chair that you’d see in an upscale med spa, is designed for waiting, not settling in. A 30-minute chair. The other end of the spectrum is where aesthetics take precedence over comfort—if your La-Z-Boy is lowbrow and your vaguely Scandi DTC special hovers in a crowd-pleasing middle, then the world of design-fair chairs sits solidly (and smugly) at the top. It feels incorrect to tie moral value to aesthetics, but it seems like the more “difficult” (or uncomfortable) the chair, the higher cultural and aesthetic value it has—or maybe needs in order to justify its existence. When I presented my loose thesis to Witold Rybczynski, the architect, professor, and author of a very useful book about chairs, he offered a defense: “The La-Z-Boy is a fine chair, to call it lowbrow is just snobbism.”
And actually, I could not agree more! But much like sex or how you take your coffee, comfort is different for everyone, and the idea of what fits that criteria is deeply personal and extremely specific. Chairs should always be comfortable, right? I think so. Am I wrong? Maybe!
A chair can be many things. For instance: an artistic expression of its maker’s personal philosophy about how design functions, or a product in a category that abounds with options for the modern aesthete to telegraph their taste. They’re also functional objects, made (for the most part) to be sat in.
Appealing form and comfort aren’t always mutually exclusive; vintage Status Chairs and their re-editions are often comfortable and nice to look at. Though those factors are not a requirement for a chair, I’d argue that the best chairs should at least try to tick both boxes. “A Saarinen Womb chair and an Eames lounge chair are pretty comfortable,” Rybczynski says. “There are many 18th-century French chairs that are much more valuable, and are eminently comfortable.” It’s true that the midcentury chairs of note were radically comfortable for their era—but as time and innovation marched on, the idea of comfort in chairs and furniture has evolved.
Sami Reiss of the “furniture-demystifying” Substack SNAKE points out that the way we’re even looking at comfort now is relatively new: “The only chairs that had backs on them up until maybe 200 years ago were for like, kings and royalty. Everyone else just sat on stools,” he says. “We’re living in a gilded age of comfort.”
The chairs that are not comfortable very often fall in the murky world of “collectible design,” where you can go to a design fair and sometimes find a gallerist hawking what appears to be a pile of sticks held together with packing tape, accented with hints of chrome—a chair, sure, but according to whom? These makers exist, but when I talked to noted Chair Guy Eric Trine, I was pleased to hear that this is not necessarily the norm: “I went to Parsons last year and talked to design students and they really do care about comfort,” he says. “They are beside themselves when they go to these collectible design shows. And they’re like, why the fuck aren’t they making comfortable chairs?” A comfortable chair is a sellable chair—one that could be ordered en masse by a restaurant, a hotel, or an interior designer, for a large sum of money.
There is nothing wrong with highbrow chairs that lean more toward sculpture than comfort. They are art, not industrial design, and therefore the rules of engagement are different. Art doesn’t have to be comfortable to sit in, to look at, or to interact with, and often, that’s the point. What you might see at Design Miami or on your favorite designer’s favorite designer’s Instagram story is compelling because they are inherently provocative, like all good art can be. As Trine points out, “Collectible design is, as a genre, probably closer to craft or decor. The design aspect of it is a bit of a misnomer, because it’s only design in so much as these objects are known silhouettes.” The aforementioned pile of sticks, then, could sit in a regular person’s home as not an actual chair to use, but one to admire. “It’s kind of like a grand tradition in design,” Reiss says. “There’s always a piece of furniture that’s off limits.” Think of it this way: If you can’t afford an Eichler or even a suburban split-level fixer-upper, a freaky little chair in the corner by an end table you don’t love is, at the minimum, a bit of fun for guests, and maybe also for you, even if sitting in it for longer than four minutes aggravates your sciatica.
If you’re of the mind that furniture is meant to be a statement—something you love, even if it doesn’t make sense to others—then comfort might not be a concern. (David Michon of For Scale recently riffed on this idea in his print issue.) And people really do love these chairs, even if, and especially because, they are conceptual interpretations of the idea of a chair that challenge the viewer’s understanding of what a chair is. When I posed this question to Rybczynski, a man who certainly knows a thing or two about chairs, his answer was refreshing. “I don’t agree that the function of a chair is to ‘challenge the viewer’s understanding,’” he says. “Come on, it’s just a chair.”⌂