Humanscale’s New $15,000 Lounge Chair Is the Ultimate Home Office Workstation

Digging through the old magazines at Humanscale headquarters near Bryant Park in New York, I find a photo of the late industrial designer Niels Diffrient sitting on a lounge chair. This was no ordinary seat.

This is the Jefferson chair, created by Diffrient in 1984 for the now defunct furniture brand Sunar-Hauserman. To the left, a bulky HP computer (considered compact at the time) rests on a swivel side table, and in front of Diffrient are a keyboard, coffee, and a pastry. He named the chair after Thomas Jefferson, who wrote on a chair in his bedroom with its legs up and a work table nearby. In a interview with the New York Times In 1984, Diffrient said of the founding father: “He realized that the more comfortable your body was, the more energy you had left for the thought process. »

It’s hard not to see the parallels between the Jefferson, which had a short life after its manufacturer went bankrupt, and the new Diffrient living room on a human scale. This is the last design from Diffrient before he died in 2013. This lounge chair also has a built-in swivel side table for your (much smaller) laptop. There’s an optional ottoman for your feet, and under the chair are two USB-C ports to keep your devices charged. You can adjust the tilt and headrest via two levers, and the motors gracefully move the chair to the position of your choice.

Eames 2.0

The Diffrient Lounge is a new entry into the high-end residential market from Humanscale, the office chair company famous for Liberty Chair. Designed by Diffrient, kicking off a long-standing relationship between Humanscale and the designer, the Freedom was a pioneer in weight-activated, self-adjusting ergonomics now commonplace in all countries. office chair industry.

All those levers and buttons under the chair? It turns out that most people didn’t know what they were doing or how to operate them. “Chairs are too complicated,” Humanscale CEO Bob King told WIRED, who embarked on his quest to find a designer who could provide a simpler ergonomic solution where people wouldn’t need a manual to understand how to adjust the chair to their body.

Diffrient is considered the last of the mid-century modernists, and this new chair mimics Freedom’s shape. The lack of manual adjustment aside from the tilt mechanism is, again, a feature. But this luxury chair marks a shift toward residential work for Humanscale, which is aimed largely at companies looking to fill empty office spaces with comfortable seating.

“When the pandemic hit, it 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 has become a much larger topic, and we have actually given [the Lounge] a little facelift to make it feel like a residential product for this reason. “

The chair starts at $8,995, but that doesn’t include the side table or ottoman. Add them up and it costs $10,995. The model pictured above uses alpaca wool fabric and brings the cost to $14,995. (There are more than 300 fabrics and colors to choose from, and the swivel table comes in different wood grains.) The Herman Miller Eames, from which the Diffrient Lounge is also inspired, costs about $8,500 todaydepending on the 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,” says Silva.

Don’t let the name of the Lounge fool you. Silva assures me that every chair the company designs is designed with ergonomic comfort in mind, with an adjustable work surface and headrest allowing for different postures. While traditional lounge chairs focus on style, Silva says the Lounge prioritizes comfort. During my brief time on the chair, it indeed seemed enveloping and comfortable while supporting me. And the mechanical levers made it easy to move the chair to a more active sitting position or a more relaxed posture, without disrupting the ergonomics with a laptop on the table.

Diffrient had been thinking about the idea of ​​a lounge chair that could double as a workstation for a long time, Silva says, and thought technology allowed people to work in different ways.

“The president recognizes the fact that creativity and productivity don’t necessarily happen when you’re tied to your desk,” he said. “They occur in different postures: more relaxed or moving around the office, and this chair supports these 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, much of that weight goes into the backrest, so when you lie down, there is much less pressure on your spine. “Lying down is really healthy,” King says. “He always thought it would be a good way to work.”

Luxury seat

How does a chair cost $15,000? Silva highlights Humanscale’s long-standing approach to simplicity. After all, it’s a feature of the original Freedom chair. Although the Diffrient Lounge doesn’t look very complex, it is by design, cleverly hiding the designed mechanical system with clean lines and curves. There’s even some automation in the headrest. If you are fully reclined and the headrest is in the forward position to support your head, when you come back up, the headrest will automatically move to the neutral position.

Motorized movements require a source of energy. Plugging a chair into the wall may seem counterintuitive, but Humanscale might just be joining a growing trend here. Gaming company Razer recently presented conceptual chairs that require energy to power various features to keep gamers immersed, like built-in speakers or cooling technologies. The relatively new LiberNovo Omni Chair has a built-in battery to power a spinal massage.

How to hide the unsightly power cord in your $15,000 chair? “If you don’t have electricity in the center of the room, you’ll need to design something around that,” says Silva. But he points out 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 an issue to think about, but it’s been addressed.” Of course, it is always possible to slide the cable under a carpet.

This is Humanscale’s first power chair, so the company is going through standard validation and testing processes, as well as third-party certifications from organizations like UL. Humanscale also has longevity in mind, but technology can often mean a shorter life cycle. To solve this problem, the 140-watt USB-C power module built into the chair can be upgraded in the future without major design changes.

Humanscale has also limited itself to a relatively narrow line of chairs since the company’s founding in 1983, which Silva calls focusing on depth rather than breadth: more meaningful, problem-solving products that take more time to design and develop. The company is also a certified B Corpmeaning it has been independently reviewed to meet high standards for social and environmental performance. For example, Humanscale claims its facilities run 100% on rainwater for manufacturing; It is facility in Piscataway, New Jerseyhas a rainwater harvesting device that operates in a closed loop, so the water is continuously reused.

None of this means the company won’t try to aim for 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 everyone having a home office. »

More than 50 years after the Eames’ debut, the Diffrient Lounge may just be able to take over and become the coveted seating choice for home offices everywhere, provided you have the budget to match.