The delivery driver said it before any of us did, standing in the doorway with the box on a trolley going “you know that’s not actually going to fit through here flat, right?” and he was correct, and we had to take the door off its hinges, and that set the tone for the entire relationship.
Nobody measured the room properly. That’s the honest version. We measured the chair, wrote the number down, felt very organized about it, and then failed to account for the fact that an egg chair doesn’t just occupy floor space, it occupies swing space, sitting space, the radius a human body needs to get in and out of the thing without doing a little hop. One of the flat’s corners looked enormous, empty, crying out for a chair. It was, we discovered, enormous enough for the chair and nothing else. No side table.
No lamp. Just the chair, alone, like a throne with poor planning around it.
The stand takes up more floor than people expect and nobody believes this until they’re standing in their own living room watching it happen in real time.
Once it was in, though, it became the single most fought over object in the house, which nobody predicted, because on paper it’s one chair among several. In practice it is the only spot anyone wants to sit in on a Sunday, and there is a very specific hierarchy that emerges within about four days of ownership, based mostly on who got home first and who is willing to physically stand there giving someone the eyebrows until they move. It has caused actual arguments.
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Not serious ones. The kind where someone says “fine, take it” in a tone that means the opposite of fine.
The rocking motion is the whole seduction, and also occasionally the whole problem, because if you’ve had two glasses of wine and get in slightly wrong, you will rock a bit further than intended and there is no dignified way to recover from that.
We didn’t love how much light it swallows if you put it near a window, which we did, because obviously, that’s where the good chair goes, and now there’s a permanent shadow across one side of the room that we’ve decided to just call “atmosphere.”
What we do love, properly love, is that it turned an unused corner into the place three different people now claim as theirs on a rotating and entirely undocumented basis. Guests sit in it within about ninety seconds of arriving, every time, without asking, like it’s magnetic.
If you’re buying one, walk the actual space first, don’t trust the tape measure alone, and accept now that whoever sits in it longest on day one will consider that their chair forever. We didn’t accept that fast enough, and we’re still hearing about it.
