Design your life to include more money, health and happiness with less stuff, space and energy.

Design your life to include more money, health and happiness with less stuff, space and energy.

Chair Marries High Design with Space Efficient Design

In the coming months, we will be highlighting products and services we use in the LifeEdited apartment. Today, we’re looking at the Eco chair by Voxia.

One of the main design criteria for the LifeEdited apartment was the capability to host dinner parties for ten. We chose the Resource Furniture Goliath Table as its ability to expand from 17″-115″ was hard to beat. Seating was more difficult. Though there are many great folding chair options, we wanted something that looked a bit more permanent, so we narrowed our search to stacking chairs. At the time, lifeedited.com wasn’t much to look at, so we had our friends at Treehugger do a roundup of stacking chairs.

While there were a number of great options, none were as aesthetically or functionally appealing as the Eco by Voxia. It matched the look of the apartment perfectly. Most important, the chairs stacked extremely tight. The surface is a mere 9mm thick; with protective pads 13mm. There is a negligible gap between chairs when stacked. This tight fit allowed us to fit all ten chairs in one cabinet.

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The chair is one piece of compression molded beech plywood, which the company claims uses 1/8 the amount of wood of most conventional chairs.

The chairs are quite comfortable. Though we must say that the seat portion, which is about 15″ wide, favors the slimmer set.

Unfortunately, the Swedish chairs do not have a US distributor just yet. Pricing ranges from about $350 for the beech finish version to $426 for painted versions (pricing is approximate as there is no official US price list). While this was actually middle-of-the-pack pricing for a number of the designer chairs we looked at, it’s admittedly a good chunk of change.

What is unique about the Eco chair is that it marries high design with space-saving features. The current paradigm suggests that if you want high design, you probably have a big home and don’t need to worry about space efficiency. We’d love to see more exquisite furniture like this for a new breed of home where efficiency and high design go hand in hand.