Explainer | Is the Ironrite Health Chair the best flat-packed chair ever?

Back in 1911, an earnest little Michigan company called Ironrite Ironer started producing automatic electric ironing machines (sometimes known as Mangles, I suspect because of what their big rollers would do to your hands if you weren’t careful).

These were the days before lightweight handheld irons, when women (always women) lost hours of their day, on their feet, wrestling with heavy irons.

Ironrite Ironer marketed its machines as a modern, more efficient, less labour-intensive solution to the grinding slog of housework – a progressive idea that ended up being quite successful. The company lasted 50 years before finally succumbing to the onslaught of lightweight electrical hand irons in 1961.

In 1938, Herman Sperlich, the founder and CEO of Ironrite Ironer, came up with a progressive idea: to include an ergonomic Ironrite Health Chair with the iron. (“Ergonomics” was very much a new idea, and generally women were the last category of person to benefit from it.)

Despite being conceived as not much more than an accessory to the iron, it’s a charming and friendly little chair and one of my all-time favourite designs. Its aesthetic is clean, utilitarian, pre-war modern, with a scent of Bauhaus. The seat has a pleasant springy bounce to it and the low swivel back neatly captures and supports the user.

It was cleverly engineered: the streamlined chair arrived flat-packed in a compact carton, just a stamped steel seat and back, two ribbony steel legs, a single cross-brace, and a couple of bolts. The whole thing took only five minutes for me to put together. It is one of the earliest – and best – modern examples I’ve ever seen of flat-packed furniture.