The rattan armchair was bought, by consensus, as a reading chair. It sits by the window, catches the light beautifully in photos, and has been sat in for actual reading purposes maybe four times in the two years we’ve owned it. The rest of the time it’s where coats land, where the cat sleeps in a shape that suggests total ownership, where someone dumps a laundry basket “just for a second” that then stays there through an entire season. Half the team thinks this is a tragedy, a genuinely lovely chair reduced to furniture-shaped storage. The other half thinks that’s exactly what a chair is for once it’s lived with a real household for longer than a magazine shoot, and anyone expecting otherwise bought it for the wrong reasons in the first place.
What nobody argues about is the arms. They’ve held up properly, no fraying, no that sad fuzzy look rattan gets when it’s been gripped and shoved and used as a launchpad for standing up too many times a day.
One of us was fully expecting the weave to start splitting at the curve by now, the way a cheaper one did years ago that lasted about fourteen months before it looked like it had been in a fight. This one hasn’t.
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The natural finish has gone slightly darker where hands land most, which honestly looks better than when it was new, like it’s earning the color rather than just aging out of it.
The cushion is the actual fault line. It’s a linen blend, oatmeal color, and it has creased in a way that some of us find charming and lived-in and some of us find, and this is a direct quote from the group chat, “permanently sat on looking.” Nobody has washed it. Nobody is going to wash it. There is a faint ring near one corner that we’ve collectively decided not to investigate the origin of.
The frame itself has taken the brunt of being dragged two feet closer to the window every summer and back every winter, which is not what rattan particularly enjoys, and yet it hasn’t so much as squeaked. That’s the bit that’s actually kept us loyal to it, more than the reading-chair fantasy any of us had going in.
So where we land, messily: it was bought to be used one way and gets used a completely different way, and it’s held up fine under the version nobody planned for. That might be the real test of a rattan armchair, not whether it survives quiet Sunday mornings with a book, which almost nothing has to prove itself against, but whether it survives being the thing everyone in the house treats like it isn’t precious. Ours has. We’re still not agreeing on whether that’s a compliment to the chair or an insult to our reading habits.
