Opinion on this whole category has done a full loop through the office over the years. There was a stretch, back when the first cheap one arrived, where the entire consensus was “why would anyone spend more, it goes up and down, that’s the whole job.” Then that one started making a noise like a dying fax machine after about eight months and the consensus quietly reversed itself, nobody announced it, it just happened, the way opinions do when enough people go quiet on a subject at the same time.
The cheap one was under two hundred quid and it did recline, technically, in the sense that it moved from upright to flat with the enthusiasm of someone being asked to help move house. The motor whined. The armrest fabric, some kind of faux suede that promised the earth on the listing photos, started bobbling at the exact spot where a forearm rests within about six weeks. Six weeks. We weren’t even hard on it, it just sat in a room where a human being occasionally leaned on it, which turns out to be the whole test.
The pricier one, bought later out of what can only be described as grim resignation, cost more than three times as much and the difference showed up in places nobody thinks to ask about before buying.
The leather, or leather adjacent stuff, on the arms has taken two years of a dog using it as a launch pad and looks lightly worn rather than shredded. The stitching along the headrest hasn’t started that slow unraveling thing cheap stitching does. It still reclines like it means it, no juddering, no pause halfway where you wonder if you’ve broken something.
None of that stopped an actual disagreement from breaking out over whether the expensive one was worth it, and this one didn’t resolve itself with time, it’s still going.
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One side of the room maintains that a recliner is a recliner, you sit in it to watch television and eventually fall asleep with your mouth open, spending real money on that experience is a personality flaw. The other side points out that the cheap one’s motor gave up entirely during a football match, mid recline, chair stuck at a forty degree angle for a week because nobody got round to sending it back, and asks whether that counts as “fine for the price.”
What everyone does agree on, grudgingly, is the arms. That’s where a cheap chair tells on itself first, faster than the motor, faster than the frame, because that’s where hands and elbows and the occasional plate of dinner actually happen. A finish that photographs well can still crease and bobble within a season if nobody put any thought into what it would survive.
We’ve landed somewhere in the middle without fully agreeing how we got there: buy the cheap one if you want to find out what you actually use a recliner for, then buy properly for the arms and the motor once you know.
