Why furniture from this 100-year-old design firm is still a good investment
There’s hardly an office or a home that has not been touched by the Herman Miller design legacy
5 min
If there’s a lesson to be learnt from working from home, it’s that the benefits of the ergonomic chair are real. And we have a man called Bill Stumpf to thank. A key designer with iconic American furniture manufacturer Herman Miller, he joined in the early 1970s tasked with designing furniture for the modern office.
The chairs Stumpf designed, including the Aeron – the office chair by which all others are now judged – join a long line of exemplar designs from Herman Miller, which celebrates its centenary this year.
Founded in 1923 when DJ De Pree bought the Star Furniture company and renamed it in honour of his father in law, Herman Miller started to hit its stride as a business in the 1940s when De Pree found himself in need of a new design lead.
In 1945, he hired the up-and-coming designer George Nelson who released the platform bench in 1946. A year later Nelson helped De Pree recruit Charles and Ray Eames following the exhibition of their groundbreaking moulded plywood furniture.
By the early 1950s, the Eames’ research into new materials like fibreglass culminated in the release of the world’s first moulded fibreglass chairs, the popular shell chair still in demand today.
After the success of his platform bench, Nelson went on to design the Marshmallow lounge, as well as his perennially popular range of lights, including the Bubble, Cigar and Saucer pendants.
Subsequent designs to hit the market included the Eames Hang it All, with its distinctive ball-shaped hooks, and, perhaps the best known of Herman Miller’s chairs, the Eames lounge chair and ottoman, which took its inspiration from a baseball catcher’s mitt. An instant classic, the chair is now in the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Frank Di Giorgio, director at Living Edge, which is the main distributor of Herman Miller furniture in Australia, is the proud owner of an Eames lounge and ottoman, which is on display in the Sydney showroom.
“I bought it in the 70s and it’s one of the most comfortable chairs, although no one’s really allowed to sit in it now because it’s on show,” Di Giorgio says. “It’s a design that gets better with time.”
As with all their designs, the lounge chair and ottoman was the result of years of research and design by Ray and Charles Eames. This approach to design is part of the company’s DNA. It is perhaps most evident in the ongoing development of their office furniture systems, initially developed by Nelson and Robert Propst, who joined in 1956. The pair worked together to create the Action Office system of freestanding units. Stumpf joined later, initially working under Propst.
Before the advent of Stumpf’s Ergon chair, released in 1976, there was little to no understanding of the idea of comfort in the quickly evolving world of the modern office.
Based on detailed research into the human body, the Ergon (short for ergonomic) became the blueprint by which all other office chairs were measured in terms of comfort as well as efficiency.
Stumpf later went on to design the hugely popular Aeron chair for Herman Miller in 1994, which has been copied or modified so often that its skeletal frame and stretched mesh body have become synonymous with office furniture and fitouts.
Di Giorgio says the Aeron caused quite a stir when it was released.
“I remember when the Aeron came out and everyone wanted to know where the fabric was because the seat was made only of mesh,” he said. “Now every office chair has a mesh seat. It changed the perception of office chairs.”
Given the sustained popularity of the Herman Miller range now, it’s hard to fathom that several designs, including the Hang It All, the Marshmallow sofa and Nelson platform bench were discontinued in the 1960s. However, they were among a slew of designs reissued in the 1990s as new audiences fell in love with their minimalist, mid century lines. Sadly, with the surge in popularity have come a tsunami of imposters. Di Giorgio says the replica pieces have little in common with the genuine article.
“It’s easy to create a silhouette without understanding what has gone into the product,” he says. “If people want authentic design, they need to understand the product and the trials and tribulations that go into that piece.
“The pieces are not right if the materials are not right.”
He says government legislation in Australia that allows copied designs to be sold as long as they are referred to as ‘replica’ still has a way to go to catch up with other areas of design.
“They don’t let people sell fake Gucci bags but they let (something similar) happen in furniture,” he says. “Even being able to call products by their name with ‘replica’ in front of it is problematic.”
However, he says as the appeal of the Herman Miller range endures, customers are becoming more educated about the design legacy. Indeed, thanks to the growing ‘work from home’ model, demand for a reliable, comfortable office chair is stronger than ever.
“Those new hybrid systems (of working) are not going away and people need to be supported at work and at home,” he says. “Ergonomics is just as important at home, and as we are allowing people to work from home, we need to make sure we support and set them up correctly at home and at work with desk chairs.”
While the upfront cost often puts pieces into the ‘investment’ category, it’s a ‘buy once, buy well’ model that Herman Miller and Living Edge extoll.
“Those chairs have a 12-year warranty because (Herman Miller) stand by their product,” Di Giorgio says. “The sustainability is taken into account as well – they recycle components at Herman Miller.
“You’re still finding a lot of those chairs around.”
That kind of result speaks for itself.
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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