One of us spent three years insisting the leather office chair was a mistake for anyone without an actual office, said it loudly and often, and has now quietly admitted that was wrong, because the spare room in question is currently occupied by exactly this chair and it has been fine. Better than fine. Nobody’s proud of the reversal, it just happened.
The thing photos never tell you is how much space it actually claims once it’s in the room breathing. Online it looks tidy, self contained, a neat rectangle of leather sitting politely in a white void. In real life it swings its arms out when you spin it, needs about four feet of clearance to tip back without clipping a bookshelf, and somehow reads bigger than the desk it’s meant to be sitting behind. In a proper office nobody notices.
In a spare room that’s also meant to hold a sofa bed, a drying rack, and whatever the cat’s decided to guard this month, it’s suddenly the loudest thing in there.
And yet it looks better in that room than it ever did online, which nobody predicted. The leather catches light in a way the product shot completely failed to capture, goes from flat brown in the photo to something with actual depth once it’s sitting under a lamp at seven in the evening.
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One of us keeps calling it “moody” and refuses to elaborate further.
The recline is the argument now. Half the reason it got bought was for the recline, the promise of leaning back mid call and looking, briefly, like someone with their life together. In practice it either fully commits or does nothing, there’s no polite middle setting, so you’re either bolt upright pretending to concentrate or nearly horizontal explaining to a client why you sound like you’re calling from a dentist’s chair. Nobody’s fixed this. Nobody’s tried very hard.
The wheels have earned a level of resentment out of proportion to how much they cost. Wood floor, spare room, four in the morning trip to the loo, one wrong step and the whole chair rolls off silently into the dark like it’s got somewhere better to be. Someone has now stubbed a toe on it twice in the same month and refuses to move it six inches to the left, which would solve the problem entirely.
Where it wins, properly wins, is that it doesn’t look like a chair pretending to be furniture, which most of the cheaper leather ones do the second you sit in one for longer than an hour. This one holds its shape, doesn’t creak when you lean, and somehow still gets used for actual sitting when there’s no work happening at all, which was never the plan and might be the best review it’s going to get.
[…] 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 […]