Broom Chairs

February 27, 2025

Chartreuse chairs with green tea and chartreuse bag to show what a chartreuse addict I am lol

I bought these Emeco Broom Chairs in 2016. I’m not totally sure what possessed me to get them, but I guess that’s fine because I still like them today.

Philippe Starck designed the chairs in 2012. I used to joke with people that they were my “trash chairs” because they are made from recycled materials.

I think I bought them because this type of bright yellow-green is my favorite color and I guess has been for nearly 10 years now, which is crazy to think about. People have commented on what an unorthodox choice it is to have acid green dining chairs, but I didn’t really think anything of it because I just liked the color (lol). If I had actually considered the chairs more before buying them, I probably would have ended up with something totally different because… who wants to sit on hard plastic chairs? But whatever. I like them lol.

These chairs remind me of the optimism of design school and my impression of the design world 15 years ago. They are bright and philosophically optimistic wrt its up-cycling of materials. Thinking about it makes me really nostalgic. I used to be a techno optimist and have felt really jaded the last few years. These chairs feel like they come from a similar place, imagining that design could solve practical and environmental problems through ingenuity.

There’s a whole aughts/2010s mental image that’s extremely comforting to me. It has things like these chairs, Flip camcorders, iPods, iBooks, and Erick Spiekermann’s Meta typeface (which Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design uses, and I have this twisted affinity for), all in bright colors. I think I have some kind of kindred spirit for these types of designs and often look at them and think “this is something I would make or could see myself making.”

I don’t want to be someone who gets older and lives more and more in the past though. I need to become more involved in excavating the present and discovering new things to enjoy.

My long term dream for these chairs is to put them in a backyard or something (if I ever have one) because they are indoor/outdoor chairs and very durable. At that point, I can think about new, more comfortable, dining chairs, but until that happens I’ll stick with these. Retiring these to a backyard would be a marker of “making it”.