Author: Fluffy Daddy

Adirondack chairs are paradoxical: while they appear to need nothing, after a couple of beers they threaten to never let you go. I mean that with all the affection my creaky heart can muster. They’re too low, unnecessarily wide, heavy as hell, not soft… Look at one from the side and it barely resembles conventional furniture. It looks more like somebody dropped a wooden chair down a flight of stairs, liked where everything ended up, and started a style.

Yet come summer, there is no chair I’d rather have. You can keep the sleek Italian outdoor furniture with names like Linea that costs $900 and looks as though it was designed for interrogating architects. Give me a big wooden Adirondack chair, preferably faded, preferably near water, and preferably within shouting distance of somebody who’s got a fridge full of coldies.

Summer Has No Deliverables

Part of its greatness comes from the fact that an Adirondack chair is an outdoor chair with no apparent purpose beyond holding your fanny. Most chairs are implicated in some activity. Dining chairs expect dinner. Desk chairs expect work. Folding chairs mean somebody’s daughter is graduating or the town council badly underestimated attendance. A waiting-room chair means your dentist is running 35 minutes late despite sending you four reminders about the importance of arriving promptly.

The Adirondack chair wants nothing from you. It was designed around the radical proposition that between two and six on a July afternoon, an adult human being might have absolutely no reason to accomplish anything.

This is a surprisingly difficult idea for modern furniture designers to understand. Even chairs have become aspirational. We have ergonomic chairs that improve posture, balance stools that engage your core and various Scandinavian devices that appear to require an introductory seminar. The Adirondack chair has reviewed this entire movement and decided you should have another beer.

You settle into that deep backward slope, hear somebody mowing a lawn in the distance, realize with enormous satisfaction that it isn’t your lawn, and spend the next half-hour watching a cloud move behind a tree. That’s not laziness. That’s July.

Adirondack Chairs Have More Acreage Than the Adirondacks Themselves

Then there are the armrests, which may be the finest achievement in American furniture engineering. Calling them armrests doesn’t really do them justice. They’re more like two small decks attached to your chair.

Somewhere during the design process, someone must have suggested making them narrower to save lumber, reduce weight or improve shipping efficiency, and I like to imagine that person being escorted from the workshop.

The Adirondack armrest has room for your drink, your sunglasses, a paperback and a plate containing a hamburger, potato salad and six potato chips because apparently you’re pretending to exercise restraint. You could probably rebuild a carburetor on one.

It is gloriously inefficient design based on an accurate understanding of human beings: we have elbows, and we have stuff.

Age Before Beauty

I won’t become doctrinaire about materials. Modern recycled-plastic Adirondacks are excellent chairs. They survive weather, require almost no maintenance and spare you the annual ritual of standing in the driveway with a paint scraper wondering how homeownership became your personality.

Still, wood has something plastic can’t quite reproduce, largely because a wooden Adirondack chair gets better as it gets worse. Paint fades, boards develop little cracks, one arm acquires an unexplained stain and eventually some moss begins making inquiries. After ten summers it finally looks properly qualified for the job.

Leave an expensive contemporary lounge chair outdoors for a decade and you’ve ruined it. Leave an Adirondack outside for a decade and you’ve established provenance.

Adirondack Chairs Are Instantly Iconic

The chair also performs a small miracle on its surroundings. Put two beside a lake and you have achieved something close to visual perfection, especially if there’s a dock nearby and a few pine trees willing to cooperate.

But the Adirondack doesn’t require first-rate scenery. It can work with whatever you’ve got. A suburban backyard becomes more appealing from an Adirondack chair. A patch of grass starts feeling like “the property.” The neighbor’s above-ground pool becomes “the water.” With the right sunset, you could point one toward a drainage ditch and start referring to it as the creek. That isn’t landscaping. That’s furniture doing public relations.

The Perfect Summer Reading Chair

It is also one of our great reading chairs, particularly for men who have spent the last eight years announcing that they really ought to start reading novels again. Put one of these men in an Adirondack chair with a battered copy of Hemingway, Steinbeck or some enormous Russian novel he has no realistic intention of finishing, and something changes.

Suddenly he’s not wasting an afternoon; he’s contemplating the human condition. He reads eleven pages, drinks something cold, watches two squirrels conduct what appears to be an acrimonious divorce and returns to the book half an hour later feeling unusually civilized.

This is exactly what reading in summer should be. You don’t need to finish the chapter. There will be another afternoon.

Adirondack Chairs Have an Exit Problem

Admittedly, the Adirondack chair is difficult to leave. This is frequently presented as a criticism, particularly by people over 40 who have discovered that standing up from one involves momentum, thigh muscles and a small involuntary noise. I consider this a feature.

Why are you getting up? Is the house on fire? Has someone arrived with better food? Unless there’s a compelling answer, the chair sees no reason to cooperate. Its low, sloping geometry functions as an enforcement mechanism against unnecessary ambition.

That, ultimately, is what makes the Adirondack chair such an excellent piece of furniture. It doesn’t care about visual weight because it is visual weight. It doesn’t attempt to make your patio look larger, flatter your architecture or disappear politely into a carefully curated outdoor space.

It is big because big works, wide because wide is comfortable and reclined because you’re outside in July and what in God’s name are you sitting upright for?

Adirondack Chairs Get Summer More Than Any Other Chair

More than a century of furniture fashions have come along with new materials, new silhouettes and new theories about how we ought to sit, yet these ridiculous wooden contraptions remain on docks, porches, lawns and patios because the basic idea was right from the beginning.

The Adirondack chair understands summer better than most people do. Not catalog summer, with spotless white shirts, suspiciously photogenic lemons and attractive couples laughing at salads. Actual summer: wet bathing suits draped over railings, paperback novels left facedown, mosquito bites, cold bottles sweating onto wooden armrests, somebody burning the hamburgers, kids staying up too late and adults quietly deciding to do the same.

The Adirondack chair belongs in the middle of all that. It’s oversized, inconvenient, stubbornly old-fashioned and almost embarrassingly good at the one thing a summer chair actually needs to do: convince you that wherever you are, whatever you’re looking at and whatever you were supposedly going to accomplish can wait a while.

The Origin of Adirondack Chairs

The Adirondack chair was originally designed with a single enormous plank for its back—not the familiar fan of narrow slats. A feller by the name of Thomas Lee came up with the design around 1900 while vacationing in Westport, New York (in the – you guessed it – Adirondacks). He reportedly experimented with several designs because his family needed outdoor furniture that would sit comfortably on the area’s uneven terrain. The result was what became known as the Westport chair: wide arms, a dramatically sloping seat and back, and that big slab of wood behind you.

But here’s where the story gets better. Lee had a friend in Westport named Harry Bunnell, a carpenter who needed winter income. Lee apparently showed him the design, and Bunnell began making the chairs. In 1904, Bunnell patented the design himself—without Lee listed as the inventor. And Lee didn’t sue him. What a friend!

So one of America’s most recognizable pieces of furniture may owe its commercial existence to an act that today would almost surely end a friendship and simultanesously trigger an avalanche of representation offers from IP law firms. But in the good old days, in the good ol’ Adirondacks, Good ol’ Tom and Hank worked it out with a handshake, and sealed it with saliva. Thanks to their good nature, the familiar slatted, rounded-back Adirondack was free to evolve from the original heavier, squarer, squatter beaut’ to the iconic summer masterpiece we know and love today.

A Handful of the Most Frequently Asked Questions About Adirondack Chairs