A sofa gets shared. A chair gets claimed. Give it a month and everybody in the house knows exactly whose chair it is, and heaven help the guest who sits in it.
That's why I take custom chairs more seriously than almost anything on my floor, and why the line I lean on is Stanley Chair, built in Tampa since 1949.
Who is Stanley Chair?
A family outfit. The Osiason family bought a small Tampa upholstery factory in 1949, with furniture roots going back to the late 1800s, and they've been building there ever since. Millions of pieces over the decades. Swivel gliders, barrel chairs, hi-backs, club chairs, recliners, sofas and sleeper sofas. That last one matters more than people think: Stanley is our main sleeper manufacturer, and a sleeper built by a chair company is a sleeper that's actually comfortable to sit on.
The part I care about as a retailer: it's all custom, and it's all close. You pick the frame, the motion (swivel, glide, recline, or all three) and the fabric from the samples at our showroom, and it gets built two and a half hours up the road. Not shipped across the country. Not eight months out.
How do you fit a chair to a person?
You measure the person, not the room. Seat height for how their knees actually bend, back height for how they actually sit, motion for how they actually relax. This is a fifteen-minute conversation on our floor with the floor models under you, and it's the difference between a chair that gets claimed and a chair that gets tolerated.
Floor models and fabric samples are at 1024 S Harbor City Blvd in Melbourne. More history and the custom options are on our Stanley Chair page. Come claim yours before somebody else in the house does.
Eric
