What is a cantilever chair?
What has now found its way into the German language under the term cantilever chair, but also into many offices, conference rooms, dining rooms or waiting rooms, is still called a “Kragstuhl” (cantilever chair) in specialist circles.
A cantilever chair is a piece of seating furniture that does not stand on four legs, but rather does not have back legs thanks to a tubular construction bent in an almost S-shape. This is also called a sleigh shape because the frame is bent like sleigh runners. If you sit on a cantilever chair, it swings, rocks or bounces slightly backwards. Hence the name cantilever chair! The first so-called cantilever chair was rather rigidly constructed and did not have the flexible swinging suspension.
Who invented the cantilever chair?
There is still some dispute about the authorship. What is certain, however, is that the Dutch architect Mart Stam presented the first chair model without back legs under the name cantilever chair. The chair looked similar to the cantilever chair we know today, but it was not yet very flexible. Shortly afterwards, other designers also pounced on the idea of a cantilever chair and today there are many models in numerous versions and variants: with seats and covers in real leather or imitation leather in numerous colors, with armrests, without armrests, as a stainless steel cantilever chair and of course in chrome. There are even cantilever chairs with upholstered seats or with a wooden structure. And just as there are many cantilever chairs, there are just as many legal disputes about who can call the chair their invention.
What should you pay attention to when buying a cantilever chair?
Since cantilever chairs are available in many price ranges, you should first consider what you need the chair for when buying it: as a conference chair , for the office, for the waiting area, the lounge or at home at the dining room table. For some people, the question of how many kilograms or body weight a cantilever chair can support is certainly also important.
Last but not least, the seating comfort and the sitting position that the chair allows are of course crucial. You should be able to sit comfortably for longer periods of time. Many cantilever chairs only allow the normal sitting position - with your back against the backrest. However, there are also models, such as Oyo from Aeris, that allow every conceivable sitting position and on which you can sit forwards, sideways and backwards. This makes Aeris Oyo more than just a cantilever chair - it is also a rocking chair and saddle chair and therefore fits just as well in the conference room as it does at the dining table at home. But Aeris Oyo is not only ergonomically well thought out, it also shines technically with a double steel tube construction in the frame or the plastic shell made of high-quality polyamide with glass fiber reinforcement and can also bear loads of up to 120 kg. With Aeris Oyo, you can also set wonderful colorful accents thanks to the many colors - beige-gray, black-gray, red, blue, green.
