Arranging Two Chairs

A pair of chairs may be placed at random.

For many of us, there may be something upsetting about this. Can’t the two chairs form some kind of arrangement, or acknowledge each other’s existence? 

They may be placed back to back. As if they have failed to come to an agreement and have stopped talking to each other. Or like chairs in the middle section of a waiting room, where everyone has not so much agreed as acquiesced—to sit, and follow the unspoken orders of the room’s titular purpose, and silently, to wait. A nearby television screen’s constant barrage of news items or suburban home improvement shows only adds to the humiliation of it.

Maybe one wants a pair of chairs to be facing each other. Ready to start talking again, or maybe already absorbed in conversation. Though this arrangement may also be uncomfortable for the socially anxious.

[Related note—Public Sale’s resident chair tester Alex utilizes a 5-star system for evaluating the comfort of a chair. In certain difficult cases, he has been known to add quarter-star increments.]

A pair of chairs can be put side by side. Only two don’t quite make the crowd of three that would begin to form a row. Though they are two points, the beginning of a line. There is a sense of promise.

We may be along the wall in that same office. But we may also be viewing a sunset together, overlooking some vista, or watching ocean waves gently lap along a shore.

Maybe it is the penultimate round of a game of Musical Chairs, when there is still some stochastic chaos to the proceedings, before the thrilling finale which somehow always ends up sad—one person left sitting alone. Doesn’t the winner feel some tinge of guilt in that moment, for how they violently edged out the runner-up, who is likely now on the floor, or the way they lingered and hovered near the seats, hoping the music would stop just for them? Regardless—this game has going for it the quality of encouraging strangers to rub their butts closely together, something not found in many games, though not unlikely within the niche category of Games Featuring Chairs.

[Related note—Most interior designers recommend between 30–36 inches of space between chairs, to allow for walking around them and to give those seated a sense of personal space. For dining chairs, 24 inches between center points usually provides sufficient elbow room.]

Or maybe the ideal chair arrangement adds some randomness back into the mix, putting them somewhere between the above scenarios: two chairs placed side by side, but slightly askew, or on a diagonal. Apartment Therapy recently noticed this trend, with several designers chiming in about its virtues and best applications. Two chairs slightly askew are the beginning of a curve, suggesting in a dynamic way the simultaneous possibility of conversation or shared experience, agreement or conflict, or at least movement in relation to each other, if not gamesmanship, and probably also, through it all—a bit of waiting.