The furniture handbook, p.6
The Furniture Handbook, page 6
Has It Occurred to You That…
…benches are not really suitable for use at dining tables, since sitting upright without a backrest quickly becomes uncomfortable.
…sitting on a bench with a group of other people can be awkward for a woman wearing a skirt, particularly a narrow skirt, since it’s difficult for her to swing her legs over the bench.
…benches with legs that slope slightly outward are, like similar tables and stools, usually more stable and less likely to tip over.
Office Chairs
The decision about good ergonomics in the home office often comes down to the choice of chair. Depending, of course, on what your work involves, a good chair designed for long periods of sitting can frequently allow you to get away with a much simpler choice when it comes to the table.
A good office or desk chair must provide you with lumbar support and be either adjustable or exactly the right height relative to the table you work at. In the course of a long working day, you will feel the need to change your sitting posture at regular intervals, so it’s important you choose a chair that will allow you to do so and thus avoid aches and strains.
The following are a few of the factors to be taken into consideration when deciding between different types of office chair.
Adjustable Back
Make sure you choose a chair that follows the natural S curve and supports the lumbar part of your back, thus ensuring that you don’t end up with a posture like Gollum. To take the strain off your back while doing desk work, the chair should be in contact with the inward curve of your lower back, and, to enable you to vary your position now and again, the chair should have a back that is adjustable for both height and angle. An adjustable model will also allow you to change the height of the seat if you need to.
Tip!
Office chairs and desk chairs should stand on five casters in order to be stable at all angles, since the center of gravity and loading changes when, for instance, we lean over or stretch to reach something. All models do not have that many wheels, so it is something worth checking.
Is It Possible to Change the Angle of the Seat?
Check that the seat of the chair is a good fit for your own body: it should feel neither too big nor too small when measured both front to back and crosswise. If the seat provides support for the whole of your thigh or rather more than that, it’s likely to become uncomfortable after a while. Bear in mind that there should be a palm’s width of space left between the front of the seat and the back of your knee: blood vessels and nerves lie very close to the surface in that area and, if they are subject to pressure for any length of time, it affects the blood circulation to your legs and may cause swelling of your lower legs and feet. On the other hand, with a seat that is so small that only half of your thigh is supported, the front edge of the seat will tend to cut into the thigh muscle.
Preferably, choose a chair that has the option of changing the angle of the seat. The ideal position, when working at your desk, is for the front edge of the seat to be an inch or so lower than the back edge (in other words, the opposite of what you want when sitting in an ordinary chair). This will help hold your lower back and neck in an ergonomic position. Also, avoid desk chairs that are shell-shaped or slippery.
Is It Possible to Change the Height of the Seat?
Ergonomists are careful not to make general statements about the optimum height for seats since the posture of the whole body needs to be taken into consideration. You should be able to sit with the soles of your feet flat on the floor, your upper body at a height that allows you to reach the keyboard without bending your wrists, and to view the screen at the correct level in front of you. Somewhere between 16¼ and 18 inches (41 and 45 cm) between the floor and the seat is the usual rule of thumb. If you invest in a desk chair adjustable for height, the chair will provide longer service either in your home or with someone else who has a different desk from the one you own.
Is It Possible to Adjust the Armrests?
If you have enough space for it, a desk chair with armrests is a good choice. If the armrests are adjustable for height and side movement, they will offer maximum support for your arms and for the muscles in your neck and shoulders.
When buying a chair with armrests, always check that the arms will fit under your desk without colliding with the desk drawers or apron.
Can the Chair Swivel on Its Base and Casters?
Assuming that you have sufficient space, select a chair that has casters and swivels on its base. That means that it’s the chair rather than you that does the work when you need to turn around for something on the shelf behind you or move along the desk. But don’t forget the floor covering: casters are liable to catch on the edge of rugs, and you may need covers to protect the floor. Check that the casters on your chair can be changed depending on whether they are for use on a hard floor or on a soft wall-to-wall carpet.
The Seat Material
Once you’ve gone through all the above points, it’s time to think about the material of the seat, and not just from the point of view of appearance: different coverings can make one and the same chair feel very different in use.
Leather is durable and develops a lovely patina, but it’s usually a bit more expensive, and it doesn’t breathe so it may feel sweaty after a while. Leather can creak and groan and make noises when you move. Fabric coverings tend to be softer and usually less pricey than leather, but they can bobble and tear if you get the wrong sort: you want samples not just for color choice but so you can feel and test them for quality. Bear in mind that the office furniture you are sitting on for eight hours a day is likely to show wear faster than other covered seats in your home, so it needs to be really hard-wearing. Wear and tear is often concentrated on certain parts of the chair: it might be worth spending a little extra on Martindale abrasion-and-pilling testing, as well as on color fastness if you are looking for a long-term workmate. (There is more on furniture coverings in the section on sofas.)
Netting or mesh covering has an airier feel about it, and, given that the material is perforated and can be seen through, it makes the chairs seem neater. It’s a good choice if you are equipping a small space like a home office, but it is more difficult to keep clean and to repair if it gets torn.
Desk chairs with padded seats are softer and more comfortable to sit on, whereas mesh chairs are better for air circulation.
Saddle chairs, as the name implies, are chairs where you sit astride as when riding a horse. They encourage a better posture and make it less likely you will let your back slump down. The shape of saddle chairs is also said to be good for the circulation of blood in your legs and gives you more freedom of movement than a standard desk chair.
Color
Lastly, we come to the factor that many people start with: the color or shade of the covering. My advice is the same as my advice with ski clothing—avoid black and white, particularly on desk chairs where the covering cannot be washed. On white covers, dirt shows up immediately, both on the seat and on the seat back, just from ordinary daily contact from fingers that have picked up newsprint from the day’s paper or printouts. The trouble with black is that—in addition to the risk of fading—dust, hairs, fluff, dandruff, and everything else show up just as obviously on black as on white. Gray and other intermediate shades on the color chart are usually preferable. Depending on whether you want the chair to blend in or to make a statement, you can work with contrasts or chameleon effects to draw the eye toward your chosen focus point in the room.
Tips for Better Ergonomics
• If you do your work in an “ordinary” chair, it might be worth investing in a cushion you can attach to the chairback to function as the kind of lumbar support provided by a desk chair.
• If your screen is too low—if you spend long periods working on a laptop, for instance—your upper body and neck are likely to slump down. It would be worth your while to get hold of a laptop stand that allows you to raise your eyes and achieve a better posture.
• There are also triangular cushions available with the back end thicker than the front part, so that your posture is adjusted to leaning forward slightly.
Sofas
The purchase of a sofa is a major investment, both literally and figuratively, partly because it’s the item of furniture that takes up most space in our homes after the bed, and partly because its technology costs so much to produce that it’s expensive to buy. It is also said to be the piece of furniture that most of us—during our waking hours—spend the most time on, which means that sofas suffer a great deal of wear and tear over their life span. So it isn’t out of place to do some serious research before splurging. The problem is, how to distinguish between the good and the bad when it comes to upholstered furniture? In this section I shall attempt to tease out the visible and the invisible differences in quality between the various alternatives.
The Seven Ss of Buying a Sofa
Before going into detail, and so as not to miss anything essential, here are some quick tips to have in your back pocket when looking for a new sofa.
• Size: How much space do you have available and how many people do you need to seat?
• Sitting habits: How do you sit and use the sofa on an everyday basis?
• Strength of frame: Quality, price bracket, and how long will it last?
• Stuffing: Choice of upholstery material, softness, comfort.
• Servicing: Choice of covers and time needed for upkeep.
• Style: Aesthetics, cut, and shape.
• Saturation: Color, shade, and contrast with room.
The Anatomy of the Sofa
Frame
When choosing a sofa, you should start with what lies under the surface, the basic construction. The frame may be compared to the human skeleton: it is the foundation on which all the rest is constructed. The frame of quality sofas is usually made of solid wood. Since the frame is not immediately visible to the eye, this is the part that low-price manufacturers economize on, thereby shortening the life span of the sofa and making it more difficult to resuscitate in the future when it’s in need of repair. The most basic models might even be structured around a frame of oriented strand board (OSB) or chipboard, neither of which offers much by way of comfort or durability.
Another point to check is to make sure you can’t feel the frame through the upholstery: there must be no sharp corners or edges that could wear through the coverings. To avoid this, manufacturers frequently cover the frame with a thin layer of padding or foam, and that makes it difficult to assess an upholstered sofa when it’s standing in the shop at the point of sale. An advantage of buying a model of sofa with a frame that is partly or completely visible is that it’s possible to properly examine what you are getting and assess the quality before you buy it.
Tips to Help You Assess the Quality of the Frame
• A simple way of getting some idea of the quality of the frame is to take hold of one of the front legs and lift the sofa just a little. If the leg on the opposite side does not lift off the floor, it means that the frame is bending or twisting under pressure and that is likely to imply that the sofa may well sag with usage.
• Always ask the staff in the shop about the construction of the sofa. If they are unable to answer your questions, the message is quite clear—you are in a shop that is not committed to quality.
• The weight of the sofa can give you some indication of the solidity of the frame. A sofa with a frame made of solid wood is always heavier. You should also get down and look under the sofa: the underside of more basic sofas is often left uncovered and it may be possible to see what the frame is made of.
• If solid wood is at one end of the quality scale and sheets of chipboard at the other, there is a range of quality between the two. Some sofa frames are constructed of welded metal, others of plywood. Plywood frames may vary in quality depending on how many plies the board is, but—on the whole—plywood is more resilient to knocks and wear than chipboard. With plywood you can retighten screws that work loose over time, whereas with chipboard this proves impossible, which means that you have to move the screws and make new holes. In addition to that, the more basic varieties of chipboard don’t tolerate damp, and there is the risk of them swelling and deforming in damp environments.
Springs
In the days before I learned more about upholstered furniture, I assumed that it was the feather-and-down cushioning that determined the comfort of a sofa, but in fact it is more often than not the layer beneath that that decides the issue. Does the sofa have springs and, if so, what kind of springs? (Not all sofas have them—the cheapest sofas often have cold cured foam throughout, with polyether on the chipboard.) The main springs in a sofa lie in the frame beneath the cushions, so check that the sofa has some sort of resilient, damping layer on top of the webbing layer—this may, for instance, be zigzag springs, Bonnell springs, or pocket springs.
Zigzag
Zigzag springing consists of a wavy zigzag of steel wire that runs from one edge to the other of the frame. Sometimes there are also rubber bands stretched between the rows of zigzags, and this distributes weight between the zigzag springs, leading to more even loading and increased comfort.
Bonnell Springing
This consists of a series of spiral springs, tied or hooked to one another.
Pocket Springing
In pocket springing, each spiral spring is fixed within a pocket of material so that the loading is more on the individual spring. A compressed spiral does not have the same effect on its neighbor as happens in Bonnell springing, which means that it is possible to adjust the tension in different parts of the sofa to increase comfort. Individual springs can have different numbers of coils, and the more coils a spring has, the more resistant it is.
Upholstery
The usual padding for sofas is cold foam and polyether, which is a petroleum-based plastic and something of a problem for the environmentally conscious consumer since it is usually fossil based. There are also various qualities of foam plastic. The heavier the padding, the better.
Cheaper sofas usually have one thin layer of foam between the frame and the cushions. More ambitious designs of upholstered furniture work with several layers, as when making a tart. The bottom layer, directly on the wooden frame, consists of a harder layer of foam, on which there lies a softer layer and then, on top of that, comes the softest layer. Taken together, all this provides cushioning and a greater degree of comfort: on a sofa constructed in this way it is impossible to feel the frame however hard you press.
In order to create even greater comfort, more advanced sofas have a number of layers of polyether glued together in one and the same cushion so as to make it softer at the back edge and firmer where it meets the back of the knees. This also enables manufacturers to achieve the same slope and angle as chairs, with the back edge lower and the front edge higher. This is the reason why it is not possible to move the cushions around on corner sofas—the part that lies in the corner is layered like a fan so that the front edge is firmer than the softer part that meets the back rest of the sofa. If the sofa is to have reversible cushions, it is impossible to create the slope in the polyether: this provides some indication of the level of comfort to be expected. Apart from cold foam, there are a number of producers whose sofas are made of natural materials, the core materials being natural rubber and natural latex with an overlay of down.
Cold Foam
In the manufacture of foam, polyols are added. Cold foam contains one type of polyol and polyether another. Generally speaking, cold foam is of slightly higher quality than polyether.
Cold foam comes in many different qualities, so it’s worth checking the values of the sofas you are looking at. Density is measured in pounds per square foot in the United States and kilograms per cubic meter (kg/m3) in much of the rest of the world. High density means that the sofa is slightly harder to sit on, but also that it is more durable. Softer sofas may be comfortable initially, but can feel shapeless after a while—and they are not as hard-wearing. Cold foam cores can have foam values of 1¼–3½ pounds per cubic foot (20–55kg/m3), but the extremes are rarely preferable, neither from the comfort nor the durability point of view. A good guideline is that the padding should have a volume weight of 1¾–2½ pounds per cubic foot (30–35 kg/m3) for it to last over time.
Polytex and Moltex
Polytex and Moltex are materials manufactured from the ground-up and shredded remnants of foam production bonded with glue under high pressure. Since it is a waste product, the density and hardness can vary depending on the material that was currently available.
Tip!
Within the European Union (EU), the production of foam for use in furniture must follow the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) regulations. Check that the parts of the sofa you’re thinking of buying carry eco-labeling such as EU Ecolabel and Oeko-Tex Standard 100. Sofas imported from other parts of the world may follow different regulations with regard to the chemicals used in their production. You should also pay attention to flame-retardant foams, which may contain substances that are less then desirable. They may be compulsory in certain countries with different fire regulations, and there are some producers who, against all sense, are prepared to prioritize export possibilities over exposure to chemicals.
