When you buy a chair what criteria do you use?
Do you consider it as a functional object? Do you take into account its fantastic ergonomic properties? Or do you just like the look of it?
The reasons why anybody does anything are always open to question, but when it comes to the great design challenge –the chair- decisions, it seems are not taken lightly. “We took over four months to decide on those chairs.” A customer of Right Angle proclaimed last week. A lot of the time you give a quote to a customer and then you forget about it, then a few months later they turn up and say okay I’ll take the chairs! Frustrating maybe for our dedicated sales team but that decision on that chair is one of the most contentious issues that office managers face. For example you’re looking for a good looking office chair, get it right and nobody says anything but get it wrong and well, you could alienate your entire workforce and I guarantee you’ll never hear the end of it.
But when it comes to “Classics” does it get easier to make a choice? And in any case, just what constitutes a “Classic”? A cynic might say that a classic design would be one that is inherently uncomfortable to sit on but looks good without anybody perched on it. Or is a classic a chair that various journalists, who write for certain un-named, design magazines that are struggling for their next two thousand word article and decide to make a chair classic because quite frankly why not. And let’s face it if you increase sales you’re in for a freebee!!! I’d rather think that the road to stardom begins with a well made product, a welded joint that cannot be detected as produced by the Italian masters. Or is a star name enough to send a product into the stratosphere? Having a designer ‘name’ attached to a chair will certainly gain you sales in a certain sector of the market, but that is the element of the population with their heads rammed firmly up their backsides, so they really do need something unusual. But just having a famous label on it doesn’t make it a classic in reality. An awful lot of designer chairs are really uncomfortable and take it from me I’ve sat on a few thousand, badly made objet d’art that the above mentioned cynics would jeer at and throw rotten tomatoes at. So there must be something more to it. The truth is I guess, that contemporary furniture is only deemed classic by the dealers, in the same way that modern art is only deemed of value by self appointed know all’s in suits. There is a light at the end of the tunnel and it’s this, chairs being produced by designers today are better made, more ergonomically sound and will probably last longer than any amount of classics from the past. The general quality and the general expectations for quality has risen. The public will no longer except shoddy workman ship and design with a couple bits of wood knocked together with a bit of foam and material covering it. As we raise the bar of quality one thing is now certain classics are now the standard and we can all have a quality item to nestle down into after a hard days work.
