Your votes have been counted and the IKEA Markus is your pick for Best Gaming Chair For Your Desk. At $200, the Markus is arguably the best value in the desk chair landscape, and finished second in Lifehacker’s Best Office Chair Hive Five. This is a somewhat problematic winner, because not everyone lives near an IKEA, and their shipping is prohibitively expensive. For those of you still looking for a great chair at an affordable price, we’re going to step in and recommend the Tempur-Pedic TP9000 Ergonomic Mesh Mid-Back Task Chair. This is the chair I use at home, after discovering it in this Lifehacker article. merce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here to learn more, and don’t forget to sign up for our email newsletter. We want your feedback.Here at Remodelista we’ve participated in our share of eBay auctions. We’ve also have been known to obsessively check the local Craigslist listings for that Eames lounge or set of bentwood chairs at an amazing price.
But eBay and Craigslist are just the start. To celebrate our week of Style on a Budget, we’re sharing our favorite sources for affordable vintage and used furniture. True, bargain shopping requires stamina–all treasure hunts do– but it’s not only more affordable but better for the planet to buy secondhand goods than brand-new. Word of advice: Most sites allow you the option to focus on local sellers; we recommend doing that for large objects so that you can pick up your purchase and avoid shelling out for shipping. Have your own secret source? Let us know in the Comments section below. 1. An obvious place to start for any vintage hunter is Etsy. Michelle used the online shop to find A 1970s Style Wooden Hanging Planter, and, recently, Julie has had her eye on this pair of Thonet Plywood Chairs, $249, through seller CoMod Classics. Justine is our resident Etsy prowler. And because it’s a vast marketplace, she suggests singling out favorite vendors and following them. Hers include Solstice Home, Ethanollie, Object + Light, Owl Song, Lackluster Co., Haven Co., and Gallivanting Girls.
2. “Rubylane is a site that’s been around awhile,” says Margot. “For those of us in need of a regular vintage fix, it offers the equivalent of digging around in a group antiques shop.” 3. For years, Julie kept this one to herself: Design Within Reach sells slightly dented and flawed merchandise in its own Design Within Reach Outlet shop on eBay. This set of Three White Tolix Stools is going for $227.50–they’re normally $295 each. 4: Lately I’ve been turning to Craigslist to find vintage furniture for my apartment. As with most of these sources, it’s important to make sure that what you’re buying is the real deal. In this listing for an Eames for Herman Miller Molded Plywood Coffee Table in Walnut, $600, the SF seller provides photos of the Certificate of Authenticity and Herman Miller logo. A brand-new version of this table sells for $949. 5. We learned about the Oakland, California–based online used furniture shop Previously Owned by a Gay Man when Michelle found the perfect cocktail table on the site.
Currently, a custom-made George Smith Norris Bench, normally $7,900, is selling for $2,500. Chances are you are sitting while you read this. And it’s killing you. Sitting is linked to an encyclopedia of ill health, including diabetes, heart disease, circulatory problems, muscle degeneration, varicose veins, blood clots, a slow metabolic rate, every kind of neck and spine ailment imaginable, and the topper—premature death. The more you sit, the faster your cells die. So for god’s sake, get up and do a few jumping jacks before you read the next paragraph. For the record, I did not write and research this piece at a standing desk, à la Winston Churchill. Nor did I shed pounds as I ambled in place at a treadmill desk. I wrote this sitting, hunched at all the wrong angles in an ergonomically unsound chair in my home office. I clock a lot of hours in said chair, so you would think I would invest in a sitting device that supports my spine and my life as a freelance writer. A practical person would do that.
But I’m not practical when it comes to chairs, or most things. While I have invested time and energy in researching a wide variety of office chairs, or “task chairs” as they are more commonly known in office supply parlance, I have yet to buy one. Two reasons: good ergonomic chairs are ugly, and they are also very expensive. A sidebar here: I think I should weigh in on what an ideal desk chair looks like in my universe. I feel like a workspace should be a creative hub, part mad professor’s office and part postmodern courtesan’s boudoir. The perfect office: part mad professor, part postmodern courtesan. I like cozy and eclectic spaces with a mix of modern and vintage pieces. I am drawn to pattern and color. Ideally, my desk area should be fun and a little frivolous, so when I sit in that dreaded chair I might actually enjoy myself and even laugh while I spin around in circles. This has never happened to me, but a writer with four jobs can dream. I am a huge fan of PB Teen.
So, when it comes to desk chairs, I guess I have teenage girl taste. This is a Bohemian option: Here is a more modern option. The pink one is oddly appealing to me. Let the record show, I like pink as an accent color. I’m not advocating for a completely pink room—my inner tween has better taste than that. (For what it’s worth, I have a Pinterest board filled with delightful and charming office chair options.) While the chairs I love are beautiful and fill me with a strange and giddy hope of what I could concoct whilst sitting in them, most of them would leave me in need of another kind of chair altogether—a wheelchair. Very few of those delightful chairs are in the least bit ergonomic. A little bit about “ergonomic”: it’s a word that is used and abused, particularly in the world of office chairs. I spoke at length on the subject with Devon Taylor, who works with Professional Physical Therapy in New York, where he specializes in ergonomic workplace evaluations.
He gave me the 411 on what constitutes a real ergonomic task chair. 1. The chair should be able to move up and down. This seems like a no-brainer, but you want to be able to adjust your chair to perfectly match your desk height. 2. The chair seat, or “pan,” should also be able to move back and forth. Not everyone has the same-sized butt. More petite people should be able to pull their seats closer to their desks, if need be. 3. The chair should have arms and those arms should be adjustable and preferably move back and forth and also rotate inward and outward. Proper arm support is key to preventing a wide array of conditions, from neck and shoulder pain to carpal tunnel syndrome. If your neck or wrists hurt, adjust your armrests. If you don’t have armrests, get some. 4. The chair should have lumbar support. Support at the base of the spine helps you sit up straighter. And no one wants lower back pain. Lumbago sounds like a madcap dance, but it’s just another word for “ouch.”
I’m told this is a steal for anything from Herman Miller. It’s more like rent to me. I like this Diffrient World chair (that is the correct spelling, not a typo) from Humanscale much more. Humanscale’s Diffrient World · It’s sleeker and a little more cheerful. Devon recommended this company to me. I found the chair at a couple of chair retailers for anywhere from $700 to $849. As is the norm, adding adjustable features will cost you more. My favorite of the bunch is this one from Haworth. Again, it’s not cheap. But this color combo almost made my heart sing: Haworth’s Zody Task Chair · The cheapest I could find the Zody Task Chair for was $829. There were a few office chair outlets that had it for significantly less, if you don’t mind it in basic black, with fixed arms. Haworth also has the Lively Task Home Office chair in this bright yellow color, as well as some pretty standard office chair colors. It’s significantly cheaper at $349.
Haworth’s Lively Task Home Office Chair · So what to do? I think I can compromise on aesthetics, which is huge for me. An ergonomic chair is a little bit like a pair of comfortable shoes: they’re not sexy or beautiful, but you grow to love and trust them out of necessity. If I can do it with shoes, I can do it with a chair. I could ask extended family to pitch in and give me the gift of a chair for Christmas and my birthday combined. Or I could bite the bullet and put it on a low-interest credit card. What about an Indiegogo campaign for my spine? Or I could struggle on, as is, and nobly suffer the consequences. After all, other writers have managed under much worse circumstances. Did Edgar Allen Poe even have a chair? Did Shakespeare write at a desk? What was Emily Dickinson’s workstation like? FYI, none of those three lived past 55. What is a chair, really, but a form of support, a foundation of sorts, particularly if your job is to tell stories? And shouldn’t we invest in the things that hold us up and keep us healthy?