Almost everyone on this team has bought this chair as a gift at least once, and almost everyone will tell you it’s the correct move. There’s one holdout who thinks giving someone garden furniture is a quiet act of aggression, on par with buying your sister a vacuum cleaner for her birthday, and she has not backed down on this in three years despite watching every single recipient send unprompted photos of themselves sitting in it with a drink.
The rest of us maintain that this is the whole point. Nobody photographs themselves next to a scented candle you gave them. People photograph themselves in a chair that turned out to be more comfortable than they expected, which is the exact reaction this one gets, every time, because it looks like it’s going to be stiff and stubborn and it just isn’t.
The five minute version of this chair is fine, unremarkable, you sit down, it holds you, whatever. It’s the hour mark where it actually earns anything. That’s when you notice the weave has enough give in it to stop your back doing the thing it does on a hard dining chair, the specific ache that shows up around minute forty on anything rigid.
One of us tested this properly, sat out with a laptop for an entire Sunday afternoon doing admin she’d been avoiding for a month, and only got up because the laptop died, not because the chair did anything wrong.
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That’s the actual review. Everything else is decoration.
The gripe, and there’s always a gripe, is that it looks a little sorry for itself after a hard winter left outside uncovered, which happened to one gift recipient who shall remain nameless but who absolutely deserved the passive aggressive text about it. It survives being rained on. It doesn’t love being rained on for four months straight and then sat in wet the following spring like nothing happened.
Given as a present, it works best on someone who already has a spot for it, an actual gap on a patio or a balcony where a chair is clearly missing, rather than someone you’re hoping will magically develop outdoor space to justify it. Given to the wrong person it just becomes another thing cluttering a hallway until they either return it or resent you slightly, and we’ve caused both.
The holdout’s final position, delivered at every team meeting where this chair comes up, is that if you have to explain why a gift is a good gift, it wasn’t a good gift. The rest of us think that’s a fine rule for candles and a bad rule for furniture, because nobody explains a chair, they just sit in it for an hour longer than they meant to and text you a photo. We’ve never had someone regift this one. We’ve had two people ask where we got it before they’d even finished sitting down.
