Hello dear readers! Like most of you (and as I've written about before), I've been stuck working from home for the last year and a half, out of the little converted covered porch on my house. For the last six months or so, I've been doing so with my butt firmly planted on an HON Basyx pleather-upholstered office chair that I rescued from my office when we moved out. This chair is, uh, not in the best condition1:
This chair actually originally belonged to Curse, a now-defunct company that made some kind of WoW fansite. They used to be in my company's old office (2016-2018) and left behind all of their furniture when they were acquired by Amazon. I snagged one of these pleather chairs from their board room and had been using it since.
Anyhow, I finally decided to replace the chair a few months ago and kicked off a long search for a better chair. Something you may not have known: it was really damn hard to buy a chair at the height of the pandemic. Every chair in the universe was backordered and no stores would let you actually sit down in chairs to try them out. Starting this spring, though, things started to lighten up a bit, and I was able to go to some stores (including the local Design Within Reach) and try out some overpriced chairs. In the end, I decided to go for a Herman-Miller Cosm, which is kind of a strange chair. It's designed for public spaces and has very little customization. For most people, I think that's a drawback, but I really hate highly-customizable chairs like the Aeron because when I'm in them, I spend all of my time fidgeting with the levers to try to get a slightly more comfortable experience. For Herman-Miller, it came down to the Cosm or the Eames Executive, both of which are very comfortable, low-configuration chairs. I also of course looked at Steelcase, as well as some of the cheap brands at big-box stores. In the end, I decided that the Cosm was the most comfortable option2, and also cost $2000 less than the Eames chairs, so that's what I bought3.
Now if I could just figure out some way to make it not 90°F in this room when the sun's out and 55° otherwise...
Fun fact: those little black dots you can see on the rug under the chair aren't random dirt, they're actually little flakes of the synthetic leather from the chair.
The seat is a little short, which kind of sucks, but the "auto-harmonic tilt" back is just right
Specifically, with a mid back and adjustable arms. I actually don't use my chair arms very much because I have terrible posture and rest my arms on my desk instead, but the cool-looking wing arms on the Cosm by default are... just awful...
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