"An Armchair for Life"

A Memoriam for a POÄNG: 2002-2024

The 2002 IKEA catalogue (remember those) that, at least in Germany, had the word “fart” on the cover.

It is perhaps weird to mourn a chair. Similarly, it is weird to mock the concept of chairs, which happened a few years ago when Facebook came up with the ad “Chairs” … its first ever television ad, which was parodied on Silicon Valley.

Facebook is imminently mockable, especially these days, but the ad—and its point—were good!

Nearly 23 years ago, I saved up my hourly job earnings from various summer jobs and bought myself a brown Poäng chair at the Pittsburgh IKEA. If I remember correctly, the catalog doesn’t tell the price, it cost about $100, which was a lot of money back then.

I remember the stress testing of the chair with the little LCD counter informing passerby of the number of times the chair has been punched by a pair of robots simulating one’s butt and lower back.

Who could have imagined all the memories this simple chair, which met its end last night during an unceremonious Call of Duty Warzone match, would accumulate?

When I got to college in Saint Louis that fall, I had a roommate on the top floor of Griesedieck Hall, my high school pal Joe, and those small rooms didn’t have space. In part because I didn’t opt to loft my bed. Fully assembled, my dad drove that Poäng back to Ohio. The following fall, as I settled into DeMattias, the Greek dorm, my Poäng came along and never left.

At first, it was my lounge (read: hookah) chair, as I illicitly smoked the sweet molassas-y tobacco on the 5th floor of my dorm as the campus police wrongly condemned the hookah as drug paraphernalia and wouldn’t let me smoke it on the quad. A year before I went to SLU you could legally smoke cigarettes in your dorm room. The early aughts were wild!

It went with me to the Chase as I left campus, and played a role in my living room in the Villages of Shitcrest apartments with very cringe twenty something campaign decorations.

The couch (RIP) and lamp came from my home in Cleveland. But I was never one for matching, anyway.

When I moved to DC, the chair sat in storage in Landover, Maryland until I could unpack my ABF U-Pack for a month. And briefly, there was a second Poäng, a cheaper version that appears to have been since discontinued with more metal that served a few years before being donated.

The first member of the growing Swift family to embrace the Poäng was Gus. These are perfect chairs for dogs of a certain size to nap in because of the chair’s natural angle.

When we lived in Alexandria, it was a centerpiece of the living room. If you know me well, odds are, you sat on it.

It was, and I am not sharing pictures of them here purposefully but many such pictures exist, the first accessible bit of furniture the girls used. One of them even was a little teary this morning when I informed the twins of the death of POÄNG.

Kids will be kids, but it was never abused.

For our five year stint in Woodbridge, the chair was merely a part of the basement living room and not my office. During the pandemic, it was a my late night Warzone gaming chair and often used by visitors in our basement guest room.

But when we moved to Ohio, the chair got increasing use again for reading, homework, and video games. I even got it an Ottoman, though given the age of the chair’s wood, they didn’t exactly match. But who cares.

Probably 1 in 5 of you currently owns, or did own, a Poäng: the company sells over a million of them a year. IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad owned one for 32 years. For most of IKEA’s history in America, the Poäng has been a mainstay.

It was originally based on the famous “Armchair 406” and wasn’t even named Poäng, at least until 1992. It is supposed to be the “armchair for life”, and for a large part of mine, it was the chair.

As Fast Company reports:

Japanese designer Noboru Nakamura is the creator of the Poäng. He came to Ikea in 1973 to learn more about Scandinavian furniture–and there, he collaborated with Lars Engman, the director of design at the company, on a chair that would use plywood veneer construction. In a video interview, Nakamura, who left Ikea in 1978 to start his own furniture company, describes how the chair came about.

“I learned by experience that a cantilever consisting of a U-shaped structure could, with a person, swing to some extent with the use of molded plywood, and I wanted it to swing in an elegant way, which triggered me to imagine Poäng,” he says. “A chair shouldn’t be a tool that binds and holds the sitter; it should be a tool that provides us emotional richness. [Poäng] creates an image where we let off stress or frustration by swinging. Such movement has meaning and value.”

As you can probably tell: I am a big fan of this chair. And I wouldn’t replace it with anything else: college ←→IKEA judgments be damned.

I unironically love IKEA. Were it up to me, everything would be from IKEA (and in my office at home: most of it is from IKEA: chairs, desks, bookshelves, the TV stand, lamps, soap dispenser and a wall clock: all IKEA.

I’m not “The Narrator” from Fight Club level obsessed, but not too far off.

Just last week, my wife suggested that I drop some hints (read: explicitly tell) some last present ideas for something that I truly wanted / needed. Not just a suggestion to check off a box.

I acknowledge I am difficult to buy for and struggled with an answer until last night, when a 22+ year old hex screw in the main assembly of the chair (where the arm connects with the body of the chair) sheared off. Wood cracked, too, as the design becomes vulnerable if one of the screws gives way. As I took it apart, I noticed some of the other screws were distressed or bent, too.

Debating what, if anything, can be done with the wood.

While too small in monetary value to be delivered, by 8AM the this morning, a new Poäng was ready for pick up at the West Chester IKEA.

If it lasts 22 years, I’ll be pushing 64. But if you’re looking for a chair, either for yourself or as as gift, ignore the “IKEA is for poor college kids” trope and get one of these.