There’s a running argument in the office about whether the egg chair actually gets sat in or whether it just gets photographed once, admired for a month, and then quietly becomes the place where coats live until someone visits. The camp who bought it for reading in claims daily use. The camp who bought it because it looked incredible in the corner of the room will admit, if pushed, that theirs currently has a laundry basket resting in the seat. Both camps bought a second one anyway, which tells you everything about which argument actually won.
The first one came home a bit tentatively, if we’re honest. Nobody was fully sure a chair shaped like that would earn its footprint, and the base takes up more floor than you expect from photos, so for about three weeks it sat there being looked at rather than lived in. Then someone actually got in it with a coffee on a Sunday and the whole household’s opinion changed within the hour.
That’s the pattern, apparently.
Skepticism, then a Sunday, then you’re booking a second one before the first has even properly earned its keep.
You Might Also Like
The fabric matters more than any of us expected going in. One of ours is a boucle that has taken four years of a dog leaning against it, a cat sharpening something on the base, and one full glass of red wine, and still looks like it did on day one, which nobody can quite explain and everyone is slightly suspicious of. Another, cheaper one, in what the listing called a premium weave, went bobbly at the armrests within a single winter, exactly where forearms actually rest, which is the one place wear always shows first and the one place you’d think manufacturers would reinforce.
The arms are where the whole chair either holds up or gives itself away. Fine fabric on the back and seat means nothing if the bit your elbow lives on for four hours a day pills after one season. We know this because we’ve bought both kinds now, the good one and the one that looked identical online and was a hundred pounds cheaper, and only one of those chairs is still in the house.
There is a genuine faction who thinks the swivel base is a gimmick, that nobody needs to rotate while reading, and a genuine faction who uses it constantly, mostly to face away from whoever just walked into the room. Neither side has ever conceded, and honestly it doesn’t seem to affect anyone’s actual affection for the chair, which might be the real point.
What made it worth buying twice wasn’t the shape, or the swivel, or even the fabric holding up better than it had any right to. It was that the argument about how much it gets used never once turned into an argument about getting rid of it. That’s a rarer thing than it sounds.
