Functionality in wood with the Spira Chair

Anybody who has had a sofa for many years will have probably experienced what I call the Unpleasant Coil Surprise. You know how it is: you sit on the sofa, enjoying a TV show when suddenly you feel something sharp poking your bottom. Turns out the coils underneath the upholstery are making a bid for freedom after being confined for so long.

Springs make sofas and other chairs more comfortable to sit on. I’m hoping, though, that the Spira Chair designed by Johannes Foersom and Peter Hiort-Lorenzen isn’t the type where the springs protrude from the seat after a certain period of time. To be fair, it doesn’t look like that will happen with this chair at all. What they did was sandwich a steel spring element between the back and the frame so that the back feels elastic to whoever is sitting in it.

Seeing as it is not flashy at all; in fact, it looks like it can be placed or used just about anywhere. The Spira Chair would look suitable as juice bar furniture to office cafeteria seating to bar chairs. It is available either with or without armrests. It says over at Bonluxat, where I saw the chair, that the arms are made of wood fiber. That sounds a bit weird because to me it looks like the arms are metallic. In any case, the chair comes in birch wood with chromium-plated or powder-coated steel.

Another good thing that commercial establishments – and homeowners too – will appreciate about this chair is that it has a protective stacking measure. A plastic pan covers nearly the whole of the seat’s bottom, so if you stack them one on top of the other, no impressions will be left on the seats of the chairs underneath. That sounds like a good way to make sure the chairs look good as new.