Sitting Pretty: Get Creative With Your Seating

Credit: Design Within Reach

Chairs are never just chairs. Because they echo our sitting selves, they are the most intimately human of all furniture. This is probably why just about every renowned architect and industrial designer has created one or more of them. Some, like Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona chair, or the plywood-and-leather lounge chair by Charles Eames, are instantly recognizable icons of twentieth-century culture, a necessary part of every art museum's design collection.

Vintage examples of famous chairs sell at auction for five and six figures, but it's still possible to bring well designed, intelligent, and comfortable chairs into your life for a few hundred dollars or less. They would be welcome improvements to the teachers' lounge, making precious leisure minutes there infinitely more enjoyable, but because there's probably no room in the school budget for such niceties, how about indulging yourself at home?

To find the best of the chic seats, we asked Rob Forbes, founder of the company Design Within Reach [1], to select four chairs for less than $350 that epitomize classic modern concepts. They are all simple, functional forms, so each chair can fit easily into any number of decorating schemes, or can raise the aesthetic level of a place that is -- how shall we put it? -- defiantly eclectic. When it's time to be seated, why not take a load off your feet in style?

A. Presto Full-Back Chair Designed by Giovanna Giofra, this leather-covered steel chair looks like something the Shakers might have designed if they had been hip Italians. "This lightly scaled little beauty takes up very little space," says Rob Forbes, "but it's very comfortable and has a wonderful functional purity." $340; set of six $1,938

B. Globus Chair Lightweight but sturdily constructed of beech wood and chromed steel tubing, this elegant side chair by Spanish designer Jesus Gasca is described by Forbes as "a happy and playful combination of comfortable curves with an especially elegant backside." We should all be so lucky. $248 (wood); $218 (molded plastic)

C. Air Chair "The definition of simplicity, with no superfluous elements," says Forbes of this ultralight fiberglass-infused polypropylene stackable (up to ten chairs) designed by Jasper Morrison. "The soft edges and corners make it especially friendly, and a drainage hole in the seat lets you use it outdoors. Plastic resin has never been shaped better." $110

D. Eames Plywood Side Chair Master designers Charles and Ray Eames created this enduring classic in 1946 using the most innovative materials and technologies of the time. According to Forbes, "It redefined structure and still sets the standard for modern chairs after fifty years." Molded plywood and rubber shock mounts make this a small gem you can sit in comfortably for hours, a design much imitated but never improved on. $329