Some nice chairs
Field notes, July 2026Twenty-five chairs from 1925 to 2025, and a room you can furnish with them.
I had a note on my phone called chairs. It ran to about forty lines of designer, year and link, and past a certain length a list like that stops being something you read and becomes something you scroll past. So I built the version that answers questions instead.
Twenty-five chairs, from Breuer's Wassily in 1925 to a Knoll lounge released last year. Each one carries a designer, a maker, a year, a price, a construction, and two scores out of five.
Every chair has a verb
The data has a field called motion. Its values are swivel, rock, squish, settle and recline. It started as a way to make each chair's hover animation match the object rather than applying the same lift to everything, and it ended up the most useful column in the set.
| Verb | What the chair does | For instance |
|---|---|---|
| squish | Takes your shape and keeps it for a second after you leave | Togo, Camaleonda |
| settle | Does not move, and you arrive at a fixed position | Wishbone, Barcelona |
| rock | Has a hinge or a sled and answers a shift in weight | Siesta, LC4 |
| recline | Goes back on purpose, in stages | LC1, Maralunga |
| swivel | Turns you toward whatever else is in the room | Eames Lounge |
Which verb a chair does tells you more about living with it than its price does. A Togo squishes and a Wishbone settles, and if you know that about both of them you already know which one belongs where.
The scores are estimates and the site says so
Comfort and durability run one to five and they are my reasoned guesses. I have sat in maybe a third of these. The data file opens with a comment saying exactly that, and I left the caveat visible rather than tidying it away, because the alternative is a number that reads like a measurement when it is an opinion with a decimal point.
The room is the point
The gallery is only the index. The room is a floor line, a back wall and a pendant lamp, and you pull chairs into it from the gallery. That is the question I actually had. Not is this a good chair, which the internet has already answered several thousand times, but do these two belong in the same room, which nobody can answer for you.
It is desktop only. The site says so in one line at the top rather than collapsing into a worse version of itself on a phone. Arranging furniture with a thumb is not a smaller version of arranging furniture with a cursor, it is a different and worse thing, and pretending otherwise would have cost more than the traffic it saved.
Hearts are everyone's
Liking a chair writes to a shared store, so the count under each one belongs to every visitor. A random client id in local storage remembers which chairs are yours. It is the smallest amount of backend a static site can have and still know something, and it turned the page from a list I published into a list that answers back.
The top of this market is not selling chairs
Prices span a factor of fifty-seven, from $1,320 for a Wishbone to $75,000 for Rogan Gregory's Infinity lounge, and four of the most expensive pieces are listed as available on request rather than at a number. Sorting by price is the fastest way to see the line where furniture stops being furniture. Everything above it is sculpture that will hold a person.
What I would change
The room saves nothing. Close the tab and the arrangement is gone, which is fine for a toy and wrong for something people came back to. The likes already prove a shared store is one file away. And the comfort scores want a second column for who is sitting: the Croissant chair is a five if you are my height and a three if you are not, and one number cannot hold both.