Remember the hours we spent commuting every day – to the office, to a favorite restaurant or just to see our much-loved sunset spot? Living in Bombay, my memory of trains is a sensory assault – the people standing next to you, the waft of that balmy air as it wedges it was through the bodies, the cacophony of friends greeting each other, railway public service announcements, and the hawkers selling an assortment of objects. Given the year and a half of living in the isolation and quiet of my home furniture, I don’t think I can step into a train without getting shivers. To give you the feeling of working from the office while working from home, designer Andrew Mangelsdorf created the Commute chair.
The name commute chair might give you the idea that it helps you recreate the journey (maybe it’s a variation of floo powder that transports you while sitting in place), it literally helps create a barrier between your home and workspace. Designing a home office is a luxury not everyone can afford – we often convert our bedroom into the workroom and the dining table into a desk for the day. Commute lets you mentally transform yourself by pulling up the partitions of this ingenious chair. The chair also comes with multiple accessories like a swiveling tabletop and a table light – all integrated to create the perfect desk setup in the form of one simple chair. The chair also has USB ports and holds deep pockets to hold all your knick-knacks that you need during work. The chair’s aesthetics are minimal – fitting into your home, while the beige inner fabric acts as a professional backdrop to those endless Zoom calls.
The transforming nature of the chair comes from the metal zipper that holds the chair’s privacy barriers up. Open up the zip – either from one side only or from both sides and fold the excess over the metal arm, creating an impromptu armrest. The commute chair makes commuting from work to home that simple.
Be it your work time or time to relax, we all need a barrier from distractions that surround us. Keeping this in mind, the commute chair becomes essential for your homes even when the pandemic is over – and life, as we know it, returns to the normal we were used to. Personally, I would love to have the commute chair as a reading nook, use the sides to take away any distractions, and lose myself in the wonderful world of books!
Designer: Andrew Mangelsdorf for DAAPworks 2021
