Rummaging through old magazines at Humanscale’s headquarters near Bryant Park in New York City, I find a photo of late industrial designer Niels Diffrient sitting on a lounge chair. This was no ordinary seat.
It’s the Jefferson chair, which Diffrient drummed up in 1984 for now-defunct furniture brand Sunar-Hauserman. To the left, a bulky HP computer (considered compact at the time) rests on a swiveling side table, and in front of Diffrient is a keyboard, coffee, and a pastry. He named the chair after Thomas Jefferson, who famously did his writing on a chair in his bedroom with his feet propped up and a work table nearby. In an interview with The New York Times in ’84, Diffrient says of the founding father: “He realized that the more comfortable your body was, the more energy you would have left for the thought process.”
It is hard not to see the parallels between the Jefferson—which had a short life after its manufacturer folded—and the new Humanscale Diffrient Lounge. This is the last design from Diffrient before he died in 2013. This lounge chair, too, has an integrated, pivoting side table for your (much smaller) laptop. There’s an optional ottoman for your feet, and below the chair are two USB-C ports to keep your devices charged. You can adjust the recline and headrest via two levers, and the motors gracefully move the chair into your position of choice.
Eames 2.0
The Diffrient Lounge is a new entry into the high-end residential market by Humanscale, the office chair company famous for the Freedom chair. Designed by Diffrient—kickstarting a long-standing relationship between Humanscale and the designer—the Freedom was a pioneer in weight-activated, self-adjusting ergonomics, now common across the office chair industry.
All those levers and knobs under the chair? Turns out most people didn’t know what they did or how to operate them. “Chairs are too complicated,” Humanscale CEO Bob King tells WIRED, which set off his quest to find a designer who could come up with a simpler ergonomic solution where people didn’t need a manual to figure out how to adjust the chair to their body.
Diffrient is considered the last of the mid-century modernists, and this new chair mimics the Freedom in shape. The lack of manual adjustability outside of the reclining mechanism is, once again, a feature. But this luxe chair marks a shift into residential work for Humanscale, which has largely catered to businesses looking to fill empty office spaces with comfortable seats.
“When the pandemic hit, that obviously changed a lot of behaviors and expectations in the market,” says Sergio Silva, vice president of design and innovation at Humanscale. ”Work from home became a much bigger topic, and we actually gave [the Lounge] a bit of a facelift to make it feel like a residential product for that reason.”
The chair starts at $8,995, but that doesn’t include the side table or ottoman. Add those and it costs $10,995. The model pictured above uses Alpaca wool fabric and brings the cost up to $14,995. (There are more than 300 fabrics and colors to choose from, and the swiveling table comes in various woodgrains.) The Herman Miller Eames, of which the Diffrient Lounge also takes inspiration, costs roughly $8,500 today, depending on which leather you choose.
“The Eames is obviously an iconic design—it’s timeless, it’s beautiful—but it’s not something you can work comfortably in for a long time,” Silva says.
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Don’t let the Lounge in the name fool you. Silva assures me that every chair the company designs is built with ergonomic comfort in mind, with the adjustable work surface and headrest allowing for different postures. While traditional lounge chairs focus on style, Silva says the Lounge prioritizes comfort. In my brief time on the chair, it indeed felt enveloping and cushy yet supportive. And the mechanical levers made it easy to shift the chair into a more active sitting position or a more relaxing posture, without disrupting the ergonomics with a laptop on the table.
Diffrient had been tinkering with the idea of a lounge chair that could double as a workstation for a long time, Silva says, and believed that technology allowed people to work in different ways.
“The chair acknowledges the fact that creativity and productivity don’t necessarily happen when you’re tied to your desk,” he says. “They happen in different postures; more relaxed or moving around the office, and this chair supports those transitions.”
King recites a famous quote from Diffrient: “The best chair is a bed.” When you sit upright, your weight compresses your spine, but when you lean back, a large portion of that weight goes into the backrest, so when you’re lying down, there’s significantly less pressure on your spine. “Reclining is really healthy,” King says. “He always thought it would be a good way to work.”
Luxe Seat
How does a chair come to cost $15,000? Silva highlights Humanscale’s long-standing approach to simplicity. After all, it’s a hallmark of the original Freedom chair. While the Diffrient Lounge may not look very complex, that’s by design, cleverly masking the engineered mechanical system with clean lines and curves. There’s even some automation in the headrest. If you’re fully reclined and the headrest is in a forward position to support your head, as you come back up, the headrest will automatically go into a neutral position.
Motorized movements mean a power source is required. Plugging a chair into the wall may feel counterintuitive, but Humanscale may be joining a growing trend here. Gaming company Razer recently showed off concept chairs that require power to fuel various features to keep gamers immersed, like built-in speakers or cooling technologies. The relatively new LiberNovo Omni chair has a built-in battery pack to power a spinal massage.
How do you hide the unsightly power cord for your $15,000 chair? “If you don’t have power in the center of the room, that would be something you would have to design around,” Silva says. But he points to the traditional lounge chair, often located next to a reading lamp that, presumably, is connected to a power source. “That’s not to say it’s not a problem you need to think about, but it’s been solved.” Naturally, there’s always the option to shove the cable under a rug.
This is Humanscale’s first motorized chair, so the company goes through the standard validation and testing processes, plus third-party certifications from organizations like UL. Humanscale also has longevity in mind, but technology can often mean a shorter life cycle. To solve for that, the 140-watt USB-C power delivery module built into the chair can be upgradable in the future without major changes to the design.
Humanscale has also stuck to a relatively small lineup of chairs since the company’s founding in 1983, which Silva calls focusing on depth rather than breadth—more meaningful products that solve problems, which takes more time to design and develop. The company is also a certified B Corp, meaning it has been independently vetted to meet high standards for social and environmental performance. For example, Humanscale says its facilities run on 100 percent rainwater for manufacturing; its facility in Piscataway, New Jersey, has a rainwater harvesting device that runs on a closed loop, so water is continuously reused.
None of this means the company won’t try to target lower prices, even with a chair like the Lounge, with Silva suggesting removing a few features to make it more accessible. But King says his goal is to make Humanscale the leader in the high-end residential home office market. “We went from very few people having a home office to almost everybody having a home office.”
More than 50 years since the Eames’ debut, perhaps the Diffrient Lounge can take the mantle and become the coveted seat of choice for home offices around the world—provided you have the budget to match.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: wired.com
