| Rocking Chairs & Dining Chairs Designed for Comfort Built to Last |
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Designing the Heflin Bar StoolWe design a chair or, in this illustrated case, a barstool by working from human topography to wood sculpture. We begin by building a fitting booth and hanging a seat and back in it at locations reasonable to common sense. We ask people to sit and comment. For the Heflin Barstool’s first "sitting," we had the help of 30–35 people: friends, family, and guests to the showroom.
Guided by the comments of the sitters, we adjust the pitches, angles, and dimensions and fill in the curves and contours. Once a mean has manifested, we project the principle points to the side, back, and bottom of the booth and plot them on the drawing board. On the drawing board, the points are the givens — not the solution. Art provides a form to test.
From the drawing, we build a prototype. We work on the sculpture by experimenting with the profiles revealed by three dimensions.
Enough people come through the shop (delivering, shopping, visiting, dropping off kids . . .) to test a prototype as it sits around for a while and gets taken home for testing its intended use. The prototype "wears in" and discloses its strengths and weaknesses. Developing the Weeks Rocker required building two prototypes. The Wilson dining chair took two prototypes. The Williams, five. We had to build seven prototypes to perfect the Heflin Bar Stool.
We often hear that our chairs fit everyone "perfectly." We are often asked why. First, I must say they don’t fit everyone perfectly. But we have a huge body of testimony that our chairs do fit a far larger percentage of people than common experience would suggest as possible. Still, why do they fit, tall, short, and in between when other chairs don’t? I don’t know exactly. In a discussion of chair ergonomics, an orthopedist once said to me, "We are all about the same height from coccyx through the lumbar vertebrae." This statement gives an insight — some basic subsets of human dimensions fall within a narrower range than overall differences would make you think. We work to find these subsets and to find what is essential to them in the desired activity. I do know that our design process gives us a "mold" that "cradles" most people in comfort — all but the very extremes of height and weight, and unusual ratios of trunk to arms to legs. The photo below is taken from page 226 of the American Statistician 2002, Vol, 56, No. 3. It makes particular sense to me.  Living histogram of 143 student heights at University of Connecticut A random sample of students of the University of Connecticut shows the bell curve of human heights in raw and elemental data. The women are in white, the men in black. (The difference between men and women make the curve bimodal.) The contours that we discover in our design process will comfortably support all but a few in the extremes. We miss a few more people on the tall end (maybe 2 1/2 columns in the photo) than on the short (maybe one column). |
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Topics in the Handmade DiningDining Furniture Section [Click on any link below] FurnitureSpace PlanningDining ChairsWilson ChairWilliams Chairin cherryin walnutin mapleNotes on Arm ChairsDining Chair TestBar StoolsBerry Bar StoolHeflin Bar StoolDesigning the Heflin Bar StoolTablesMitchell TrestleMcCoy PedestalJohnson PedestalPhillips Leg & ApronPaschall Leg & ApronCustom TablesSolid Wood TabletopsBookmatched FlitchesNotes on Leg and Apron TablesExtension Dining TablesTabletop FinishesBuffets, Sideboards, Hutches, etc. |
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