Office / desk chair recommendations?

josepdelafuente

josepdelafuente

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Hello,

I spend a lot of time (probably the majority of my waking time) sitting at my desk in front of my computer. Playing games, watching programs or working.
I have a nice enough office chair, but I wonder if I could find something better.

I tend to sit (like right now) quite upright with my back fairly straight, not leaning against the back of the chair.
This is tiring!
The back of this chair is designed to recline, so if I lean back on it, the back angles/folds back.

I think I'd ideally like a chair where I feel like it's supporting all of my body weight. So I can lean back into it, but it will keep me upright.
If that makes sense!

I've heard of Herman Miller chairs, but I know they're super expensive.

Wondering if anyone here has a chair they love.
 
josepdelafuente said:
I've heard of Herman Miller chairs, but I know they're super expensive.
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I used a second hand Herman Miller Aeron chair from the late 1990s for about 15 years which will likely be about £300-500 still. They are relatively easy to repair/get parts for so these early popular chairs are still constantly getting repaired. Brand new the V2 of the Aeron (which is better in every way) is about £1200. I can't personally sit in the Aeron anymore because I have nerve pain in my right thigh and the hugging supportive nature of the seat where it grips the sides of your thighs causes me quite a bit of pain. But its great for supporting good posture. Its worth looking through the Herman Miller line of chairs they have some other really good chairs like the Embody.

I now use a Steelcase Gesture (also second hand) and these are about £1000 new as well. Its almost the opposite its a chair to allow you to move about and it flexes and bends and is very open so you can sit on it how you please, the opposite of the Aeron's fixed perfect ergonomic support. Its not going to last very long however because the upholstery is almost impossible to repair and not very robust and I find the back support is garbage.

I actually bought an Aeron V2 in the black friday sale and I have had to send it back due to the nerve pain issue, its a real shame as I love every other aspect of those chairs, the cooling nature of the mesh is great and that mesh I know from experience lasts ages. Its something I have been looking into recently, I might get a steelcase Karmon (another mesh chair but less supportive than the Aeron). If I trusted the electronics I might go for a Libre Omni, I just think its piston and electronics is a bit much in a chair and a clear failure point but it really has the advantage of being half the price of these Steelcase/Herman Miller and other high end chairs and its certainly been rated well.

I just find my body accepts very little that is wrong in chairs now and you really want the seat to go back when the back reclines and you want to be able to control when it stops and how much support before it moves. A lot of the cheaper chairs don't lean the seat 1/3 as much as the back or they don't have the right stops for the back. Cheaper Amazon/Staples chairs just aren't comfortable and I am struggling to find something that strikes the balance of support to reduce energy usage and also doesn't push on a place that hurts, like my thighs and upper spine but also support my very broken lower spine. If I could just go walk around a office chair place I might a cheaper comfortable chair but that isn't possible.

That is a few models to look at and consider anyway that I have been looking at recently.
 
No advice on chairs as I rarely use them these days. But we used to have the posh ones at work. And I helped my mum get one cheap when another company closed. This happens quite a lot, especially in some cities with more startup and tech or finance sectors. So my advice would be to keep an eye on local groups/forums or if you know anyone in those industries even better, you can often pick decent chairs up cheap.
 
My occupational therapist recommended an orthopaedic chair where I could adjust every angle and position.

My employer bought something like the one linked below, and then the OT came back and spent half an hour setting it up for me. Mine was twice as expensive as this one—about £1200 in 2011, which Access to Work paid 50% of—but that doesn't mean it was twice as good.

I'd say the most important feature was the level of customisability. Next on the list was the headrest, I'd no idea how much difference that would make until I got one.

 
Last time I looked at chairs, I was shocked to see that they were built mainly of plastic. Worse, the plastic was molded in carefully engineered structures to minimize material usage, which means that they can easily fail if stress is applied in unplanned for ways (ie, leaning over to pick up a pen). I'd be surprised if those chairs would last more than a couple of years, if even that. Of course, the padding or covering might fail before that.

How comfortable--or uncomfortable--were those old wooden swivel-base office chairs? Were there more or fewer complaints about sitting on them for long periods?
 
Creekside said:
How comfortable--or uncomfortable--were those old wooden swivel-base office chairs? Were there more or fewer complaints about sitting on them for long periods?
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They were bloody awful! I had to use them when I first started work.

The padding (often under leather or PVC) had probably already given up the ghost by the time I was born, and on some of them it couldn't be replaced without levering out then replacing dozens of upholstery nails. The swivel thing didn't always work, so you had to rotate the whole chair, and as there was no gas cushioning your coccyx got a hard thump if you needed to flop down.

As for the plastic ones, I recently visited an office I used to work in. Not only was the decor exactly the same, some of the furniture we inherited when we moved more than 25 years ago was still in use. The stage manager's chair as still there (complete with the remains of a label I once stuck on the back of it), as was a high-back one in a particularly faecal shade of brown I'd recognise anywhere. We only ever broke one, and that was when some of the touring company decided to have blindfold races in them and snapped one of the wheels off by slamming it into a wall.
 
I have been looking for a while now, I need a chair which allows me to fix a mouse table to the right arm.

I have found some interesting manufacturers like Musso which has an orthopedic mesh design and MTS Cockpit Designer which has bolt on mouse tables, but I want to use a mouse table with a mesh chair, which I have not found yet.
 
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