A task chair in a university works harder than almost any other. One seat in a library or teaching room can be used by dozens of people a week, adjusted by every one of them, moved between rooms and sat in for hours at a stretch in exam season. This guide covers what that asks of a chair, and how to choose durable university chairs. If you're buying task chairs for any kind of building, our guide to sustainable task chairs covers the questions that apply everywhere.
What student use does to a chair
In an office, a chair usually has one owner who sets it up once. On a campus it has no owner at all. Every new user adjusts it, leans back in it, and moves it to wherever they want to sit. Levers get forced, castors get dragged over thresholds, and parts that can be unscrewed tend to go missing.
The hours add up quickly too. Some university libraries open around the clock during exams, so a chair can work far more hours a year than the same model in an office. That's worth remembering when you compare warranties, because many are written for a single shift.
Fewer things to break
A student-proof chair usually has as few controls as possible. A weight-balanced tilt, such as the one on the Freeflex, adjusts to whoever sits down without anyone touching a lever. For shared seating that's often better than a mechanism with five adjustments that nobody resets.
Tamper-proof fixings matter for the same reason. If a part can only be removed with a specialist tool, it stays on the chair. Glides instead of castors can also make sense in teaching rooms, where chairs shouldn't roll away from the desks.
Fabrics that survive a campus
Upholstery is where most university chairs show their age first. Look for fabric rated to a high Martindale count, which measures how much rubbing it can take. The fabrics we specified for UCL's School of Management, from Camira's X2 and Xtreme ranges, are rated to 100,000 rubs and carry a 10-year guarantee. They're also made from recycled material: Xtreme is 100% post-consumer recycled polyester, and X2 combines recycled polyester with textile waste.
Replaceable covers are worth asking for as well. A cover that can be changed on site means a stained or torn seat doesn't take the whole chair out of use.
Repair and recover between terms
The summer vacation is the natural window to repair and recover chairs, while the rooms are empty. At UCL's Chandler House, recovering 80 chairs cost £90 each against £160 to replace them, and the same chairs went back into the same rooms. There's more on how it works on our re-upholstery page.
It's also the busiest time of year for furniture, because so many universities fit out between terms, and some European manufacturers close for part of August. If anything new is needed for September, it's worth ordering well before the summer. Our guide to FF&E procurement has typical lead times.
Buying for the whole life of the chair
On a campus, or anywhere institutional seating is shared by many people, a cheap chair often ends up costing more, because it's the one most likely to be replaced early. A chair that can be repaired, recovered and kept in service for many years costs less over its life and keeps its carbon in use for longer.
That's how we approach university work. We've looked after UCL's Engineering Building since we furnished five floors of it in 2005, and our work on UCL's Marshgate, where we specified 6,065 items across eight floors, is on our new university buildings page.
If you're planning seating for teaching rooms, libraries or study space, we're happy to talk it through. There's more on our work across the sector on our universities page.