Are you someone who absolutely despises your dead-end corporate job, well then, we may have found the chair for you! Shaped like a coffin, this wooden chair recently took the internet by storm. A Twitter user shared it on September 7th, and everyone who’s downright fed up with their jobs completely resonated with it. The designer was a complete mystery for a while, but we’ve tracked him down! A former industrial designer, based in London, UK, Chairbox Design, created the chair so that, “Once the employee dies at work the management just needs to nail the lid and roll them into a corporate cemetery. Simple yet efficient. ” Sounds like a frightening, but plausible reality, no?
Designer: Chairbox Design
The exterior of the chair is carved from wood and looks pretty much like a traditional casket, however, the interiors look pretty wooden as well! There’s no cozy cushioning for you to comfortably settle into, but all that wood could provide great lumbar support. It also seems to come in a variety of color options – basically shades of brown, ranging from light to dark. There’s one crafted from walnut, and another one crafted from charcoal wood.
There’s also been a lot of speculation regarding the origin and influence of the coffin chair. It seems to be inspired by Rene Magritte’s painting titled The Balcony (1950). The painting includes four coffins on a balcony, and one of them is a coffin chair! This painting, in turn, was based on the 1869 Édouard Manet piece of the same name. In Manet’s painting, three people are posing on a balcony, with a woman sitting on a chair. Magritte drew on the details of the balcony, and the surroundings in Manet’s painting for his own painting.
The conceptual coffin chair perfectly represents all the dreaded emotions employees feel throughout the entirety of their workday. It reflects the feeling of doom one experiences, as they have to sit through another pointless meeting that could have been an email. It’s no wonder this design was celebrated so widely over the internet!
