How to Find the Perfect Chair

By Katherine Salant

Bill Stumpf has spent his entire professional life designing chairs that are comfortable and good for your body. This may not seem so unusual, but when he started nearly 40 years ago, it was a very novel concept.

Stumpf was one of the first industrial designers to apply rigorous ergonomic analysis to furniture design, and his first work was with office furniture. Part of his research included hours of observing what felt comfortable to people of widely differing body types and working with orthopedists and vascular specialists to understand the physiological effects of sitting for long periods.

The Ergon, his first office chair, was introduced in 1977. It looked odd, and it didn't gain wide acceptance initially. But over time, office workers and their employers began to understand the rationale behind the funny shape. Not only was this ergonomically designed chair much more comfortable, it also helped them perform their jobs more effectively because when they sat in it, they assumed a posture that reduced fatigue. At the end of the day, they were far less tired.

Twenty-eight years and many office chair designs later, a look around any office shows that Stumpf's approach to chair design has transformed the work environment. But the general public has yet to apply the lessons learned about chair comfort at work to their furniture choices at home, Stumpf said in a recent interview. There's plenty of very comfortable and ergonomically sound furniture available, but he said most people put looks first. "It's as if they are following the lead of Phillip Johnson [one the great American architects of the 20th century] who famously said, 'I think a chair is comfortable if I like the way it looks.'"

Unfortunately, when looks become the main criterion for selection, people end up with a houseful of furniture that is "mis-accommodated" and it doesn't fit them, Stumpf said. The seats are too high or too low for their body type, the cushions are too soft to offer good back support, or too hard with no give at all and make you sit ramrod straight. The one notable exception to this is a La-Z-Boy-type recliner. Its huge popularity attests to its comfort, not its beauty. It's big and clunky and a lot of people, including designers, think it's disgusting, Stumpf said. But even casual observation shows that it accommodates the position that most people want to assume when they come home from work - semi-relined with their feet raised. When there's no La-Z-Boy in the house, most people do the next best thing - sit in a chair or sofa, take off their shoes, and put their feet up on a coffee table.

When buying other furniture, people should use the same intuitive sense of comfort that led them to the La-Z-Boy purchase, Stumpf said. You don't have to be scientific as you try out different chairs - the sensation of comfort will register immediately, just as you sense right away that a room is too hot or too cold. When you find a chair with "true comfort," however, you won't sense anything because with this degree of comfort, you won't feel a thing. As Stumpf explained it, "True comfort is the absence of awareness. If your shoes are comfortable you're not aware they're on. If the water is pure, you can't taste it. Similarly when a chair is a perfect fit for your body, it becomes 'invisible' and you're not aware of it at all. You may not find that many chairs with true comfort, but there's many that come mighty close."

The hands-on, try-them-out approach is the best test, but Stumpf did offer a few tips for your perfect chair search. The secret to creating true comfort in a chair is biomorphic contouring of the seat. As Stumpf explained it, "You can sit on a flat board for about half an hour before you start to squirm. If you add a foam pad you can go for another 10 minutes. But if you contour the wood and put a curve that's the shape of your buttocks you can sit much longer. A chair can be simple and even Spartan-looking but very comfortable if it is contoured correctly."

While comfort is clearly his priority, Stumpf acknowledged that people choose furniture that's uncomfortable for all sorts of reasons, including religion, philosophy, and historic authenticity. A good example is Shaker furniture. With its straight backs and hard seats, its austerity perfectly reflected the Shaker religious 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 great 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 healthier 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 your eyes are more than 3-4 feet from the person you are talking to. This is almost never an issue, except in large houses. The furniture tends to be bigger to look right in the big rooms, but this can mean that the chairs are too far apart to easily converse.

With dining, certainly one of life's pleasures, Stumpf said the comfort of the chair will affect how long you want to linger at the table over a leisurely meal, 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 because it's designed to be used for several different tasks in the same spot. It can also be multipurpose if it is used for the similar tasks but easily "deployed" to other places in a house. The obvious advantage of "deploy-ability" is that you don't need to buy so much furniture, and this was the central idea behind Stumpf's Caper chair, his most recent project with Herman Miller. The polyurethane chair is so light you can easily pick it up with one hand. It weighs only nine pounds (12 with the casters), and comes in several bright colors.

As his first office looked odd and different, so does the Caper chair. It's unlike any household chair that you've ever seen, but it's also another perfect example of why you should try a chair before making a judgment. I can personally 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 had thought of it before.

Copyright 2005-2006 Katherine Salant. Distributed by Inman News.