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"Sexy" and "better with age" aren't the first descriptors that come to mind when assessing an office desk chair. Yet they are the exact modifiers Commune Design's Steven Johanknecht uses when describing his choice seat—a pick that has many designers in agreement.

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In a survey to some 100 interior designers, an overwhelming number of votes were tallied to the Eames office suite, with respondents naming the Aluminum Group chair or the Soft Pad chair—its "cushioned cousin," as manufacturer Herman Miller refers to it—as their favorite desk chairs.

"There are very few desk chairs that are comfortable and good-looking," says Frances Merrill of Reath Design, who cast her vote for the lightly padded Aluminum Group seating. The chair's stylistic versatility must also be counted among its superpowers, insists Johanknecht, who has the Soft Pad iteration in his Los Angeles home office. "The chair is a design icon—so classic that [it] mixes really well with other furnishings."

Johanknecht went with camel leather upholstery for the Eames Soft Pad chair in his Los Angeles home, which was featured in AD in October 2019.

Photo: Stephen Kent Johnson

The Aluminum Group chair traces back to the Miller House, the 1957-built Columbus, Indiana, home of industrialist scion J. Irwin Miller that frequently appears on must-see modern architecture lists to this day. The project's blueprint was in good hands with architect Eero Saarinen, interior designer Alexander Girard, and landscape designer Dan Kiley, and even more so when Saarinen and Girard approached Charles and Ray Eames with a request for quality, modern outdoor seating for a stretch of concrete overlooking the property's vast and verdant lawn.

The resulting chair, which was put into production by Herman Miller in 1958, featured a synthetic mesh support pulled taut within a suspended cast-aluminum frame—a novel technical turn from traditional, shell-structured seating that was inspired by the postures of outdoor counterparts such as the hammock and camp chair. While onlookers can still spot a set of Eames Aluminum Group chairs perched on the patio of the Miller House, the chair became better recognized for its interior applications.