Settling in after a week off, I found that the yoga ball had been relegated to a conference room and a new employee had appropriated my door. Good thing I had brought in my favorite office chair, the Levenger Sprezzatura, and was able to scavenge a nearby IKEA Galant. Interesting that when viewed in actual natural light, the chair is in fact red, not as many would suppose, orange.
I fell in love with the simplicity and small footprint of the Sprezzatura chair at the Levenger store a couple of years ago. Lots of people look at it and ask how I can sit in a chair without arms all day, but I’ve never missed them in an office or work chair. I now have two, a black one at home and a red one at work. When I went back to research the chair for this post, I found that they seem to have been discontinued. Or at least replaced with the very similar but not quite as interesting Morgan Desk Chair. I can’t help but feel that the seam is in exactly the wrong place.
Sprezzatura, by the way, is an excellent Italian word that’s fun to say. It means – according to the dictionary applet on my Mac – “studied carelessness, esp. as a characteristic quality or style of art or literature.” A more detailed and art-historical elucidation of the term is over at the wikipedia, but I use a definition more along the lines of “making hard stuff look not just easy, but also stylish.”
Other citations for this wonderful chair come from the also wonderful Book of Joe, which notes that the Sprezzatura is “intended for small home offices where space is really tight.” That’s part of the appeal, definitely. Apartment Therapy posed the question, what’s a good compact desk chair that doesn’t look officey, and at least one of their alert readers nominated the Sprezz, although several others mentioned are now on my list to check out.