THE WESTPORT CHAIR ... THE ORIGINAL ADIRONDACK CHAIR
A QUEST FOR THE ULTIMATE LAWN CHAIR
Our story begins in 1903 with a gentleman by the name of Thomas Lee. Lee had a beautiful summer
place up in Westport, NY right on Lake Champlain, but he also had a bit of a problem. It wasn’t the
house, or the view of the lake; the problem was that he didn’t have one decent piece of outdoor
furniture. Now, as we all know, standing up while viewing a summer sunset is nice, but watching
that sunset while comfortably seated with a cocktail at hand is always nicer. So Lee set out to build
his family the ultimate lawn chair. But he didn’t want to make just any old chair. This chair needed
to be comfortable and durable, have as solid surface to rest a glass, and above all, be sturdy when
placed on the sloping terrain of the Adirondack region. Lee tried out several different designs and,
using his family members as “test sitters,” eventually settled on a chair constructed from eleven
pieces of wood all cut from one single plank. It was a low-slung, spacious design with a high back
and extra-wide armrests for that all-important summer beverage.
Now, things would have been just fine for the Lee family if the story ended here. They were
comfortable, they were relaxed, and most importantly, they were off the ground. It was summer and
life was good. But things were about to get interesting.
A TALE OF TWO FRIENDS—AND ONE
PATENT
One fine afternoon that summer, as Lee was relaxing
by the lake in one of his new chairs, his good friend
and hunting buddy Harry Bunnell stopped by to chat.
Bunnell, who was a carpenter by trade, took an
immediate liking to Lee’s new chair design. As the two
men talked, Bunnell suggested he could build Lee’s
chairs at his wood shop in the off-season. Bunnell
could make a few extra dollars during those cold
Adirondack winters; Lee’s chairs would get sold. It was
a win-win. “Why not?” thought Lee. Bunnell was a
stand-up guy, trustworthy, and above all, he was a
friend. So Lee lent the plans to Bunnell and, with
nothing more than a handshake and a smile to seal the deal, Bunnell set to work cranking out Lee’s
chairs. That winter, Bunnell toiled away, building Lee’s chairs out of hemlock or basswood and
staining them in green or medium dark brown. As soon as the Westport residents saw the new
chairs, they snapped them up. Bunnell realized he had a huge seller on his hands and had to act fast.
In early April of 1904 (and without asking for Lee’s permission) Bunnell filed for a patent (No.
794,777) on “his” new chair design naming it the Westport Plank Chair. We’re not sure how this
affected his relationship with Lee, but we can guess Bunnell no longer stopped by to chat with his
old hunting buddy. Harry Bunnell manufactured the Westport Plank Chair for the next twenty years
putting his signature on each one. Today, the original signed Bunnell chairs are extremely sought
after, and can fetch thousands at auction. (source: The Orvis Company Inc.)
HAVE YOU OWN PIECE OF HISTORY
Spruce Point Inn is pleased to have the original style Adirondack Chair on the grounds for our guest
to enjoy. We offer the Chair in an easy-to-assemble kit of cypress wood for $495 plus handling &
shipping. These are high-quality Chairs that will last a life-time outdoors unpainted because of the
of the superb wood and the stainless steel (316L) screws.
A child-sized Chair is also available using the same materials for $349 plus handling & shipping.
The Chairs are available at the Inn for guests who would like to take one back home with them.
More copy to consider
The first Adirondack chair was created by Thomas Lee around 1903. Lee was searching in vain for
comfortable outdoor furniture for his country cottage in Westport, NY, which is near, you guessed
it, the Adirondack mountain region of upstate New York, on the banks of Lake Champlain.
According to legend, Lee created several prototypes for chairs made out of just eleven pieces of
knot-free wood, all from the same tree. His family — all 22 of them — tested each chair, and
ultimately decided upon the gentle recline and wide armrests of what we now know as the
Adirondack chair.
Lee had a hunting buddy, a local carpenter named Harry Bunnell, who was in need of some offseason income. Lee showed Bunnell the chair and encouraged him to start making them for the
locals. Bunnell immediately saw the appeal of Lee's creation. Unbeknownst to Lee, he applied for a
patent on the design, which he received in 1905. Bunnell called them Westport Chairs, and he made
out of hemlock or hickory, and sold them very profitably for the next twenty years. Lee never
received any of the profit from Bunnell's savvy business decision, and there is no evidence that he
sought any. Whether this is admirable or tragic is up for personal interpretation, though it is
generally accepted that Bunnell essentially "stole" the design from Lee.
In the ensuing 105 years, the chair has been adapted again and again. The back is often raked, made
out of between 3 and 7 slats of wood instead of the single plank of the original Westport chair. One
explanation for this is the difficulty of finding knot-free wood; a single slab of wood with knots and
other irregularities is less comfortable than several slats of the same wood, and considerably more
expensive.
Despite these adaptations, Adirondack chairs are remarkably recognizable, and unflaggingly popular.
Their endurance shouldn't be too much of a mystery: simple, comfortable and unpretentious.
Although Thomas Lee created his chair supposedly out of a combination of necessity and economy
of materials, there were obviously reasons why the typical late Victorian wrought iron or wicker
garden furniture wouldn't do. His Adirondack chairs carry associations of a vernacular past, like a
shared collective memory. In this way, they remind me of Gustav Stickley's Craftsman furniture
from the same era (image 4), solid, hand-hewn wood furniture that evokes a folk aesthetic. The years
around 1900 were ripe for that sort of folksy, handmade furniture, at least in part because the rate of
modernization and urbanization had increased so profoundly that designers and consumers sought a
material connection to the past.
In our own era, the chairs' association with a vernacular past is compounded by their literally being
artifacts from the vernacular past — funny how that works. Today, they are universal signifiers of
summertime leisure. Can't you feel the lakeside breeze?
More copy to consider from Yankee Magazine
On Bruce Ware’s porch above the shores of Lake Champlain, I lower myself into a deep wooden
chair and lean back. “The way you’ll know a real one is the height of the chair off the ground, and
where your knees come up to,” Ware tells me.
“In some, where the angle is wrong, they’ll throw you back. With others, you just sit down in them
and they fit you naturally.”
Actually, I’m not so sure about this one: My knees are at the right height, but the chair seems overly
deep and the angles a bit rigid. I feel as though I’m forced to stare at the ceiling. The wide arms
extend far out in front of me like an experiment in perspective. I look over at Ware, who’s sitting in
a similar chair a few yards away, and it feels a little as though I’m peering out of a ravine. This may
be a “real one,” but it’s not the one I was hoping for.
The history of the Adirondack chair is like a great river–something that started as a rivulet and in
time has gathered up shapes and colors and materials as it churns resolutely from the past to the
present. At this moment, I happen to be sitting at the very headwaters. The two chairs in which
Ware and I repose are versions of the chair made by Thomas Lee, who was Ware’s great-great-uncle.
Lee, it turns out, invented the Adirondack chair.
The Adirondack chair is defined as “an outdoor armchair having an angled back and seat made of
wide, usually wooden slats.” In 1903, Lee–Boston blueblood, global adventurer, and early bohemian
who spent more time at his family’s Lake Champlain summer house in Westport, New York, than
his family might have preferred–nailed together the first proto-Adirondack chair out of some wide
boards. The seat and back were crafted of single wide hemlock planks, which met at an angle
designed more for leisure than labor.
The precise angle may have evolved from the chairs crafted for patients taking the fresh-air
tuberculosis cure at nearby Saranac Lake, which was home to many sanatoria. But perhaps not.
Thomas Lee’s niece Mary once recalled that her uncle got “various members of the family together
to sit … and tell him when the angles felt exactly comfortable.”
To my mind, Lee’s real stroke of genius came in adding the chair’s broad, practical arms–nearly as
wide as small sideboards. “I guess they were designed [so that you could] sit with a cup of coffee and
a newspaper,” Ware says. The arms make the chair a self-contained pod, a place where you can settle
in with a beer, a sandwich plate, and a book or magazine, and still have plenty of room for splaying
out your forearms and elbows. Adirondack chairs are destination furniture, one-person resorts you
put in your yard.
Thomas Lee, of course, invented more than a chair. He invented an icon–something that would
come to personify a season as neatly as a Weber kettle grill or an hourglass-shaped hummingbird
feeder. In the proper location and under proper conditions, Adirondack chairs speak. But they speak
a language with only one word. And what they say is: Summer.
For much of my adult life I’ve been involved in what I’ve come to think of as the Goldilocks
Project. When I see an Adirondack chair for sale–whether it’s outside a retiree’s garage workshop or
stacked at an outlet mall–I stop and I sit.
John Cheever’s character Neddy Merrill traversed Westchester County by swimming from one
backyard pool to the next; I’ve been sitting my way across New England, one Adirondack chair at a
time. And if there’s anything I’ve learned in 15 years of dogged lounging, it’s this: You can’t tell an
Adirondack chair by its appearance. You really have to sit in it. Some are too big. Many are too
small. And some–very few, actually–are just right.
It’s not only a matter of angle and knee height. There are the materials to consider. The modern
versions available in extruded plastic and sold at big-box stores are actually not bad-looking, and
they’re pretty comfortable, too, but they lack the proper rigidity. Anyway, a late-afternoon squall will
send them flying across the yard like tumbleweeds. That’s more than a minor flaw. An Adirondack
chair needs ballast.
There are other considerations, like color. Green is good, with forest green the very best. Fire-engine
red is cheerful. White is classic, but there’s the problem of glare. Yellow, not so much. A blue chair
is, for some reason, always uncomfortable.
Here’s another important thing about Adirondack chairs: Where you put them has an outsized
impact on their comfort. Place matters. Inside a house? Never. It’s like a spray-on tan–there’s
something unsettlingly unnatural about an Adirondack chair with a roof over it. Adirondack chairs
need to be outdoors and, ideally, should be set off by themselves–at the end of a dock that extends
into a large lake, or on an open, grassy rise with views of distant mountains, or simply at the far edge
of a suburban lawn.
The writer Paul Auster captured what for me is the ideal chair in his 2007 novel Travels in the
Scriptorium, about a man whose memory has failed and who struggles to recall his past life. At one
point, the character “closes his eyes [and] he is once again in the past, sitting in a wooden chair of
some kind, an Adirondack chair he believes it is called, on a lawn somewhere in the country, some
remote and rustic spot he cannot identify, with green grass all around him, and bluish mountains in
the distance, and the weather is warm, warm in the way summer is warm, with a cloudless sky above
and the sun pouring down on his skin …” That’s my memory of every Adirondack chair I’ve ever
sat in, even those on misty spring days with a chilly north wind.
When I read that the first Adirondack chairs had been invented more than a century ago in
Westport, New York, I drove there to find out what I could learn. I checked in at The Inn on the
Library Lawn, and asked the host, Anthony Wheeler, whether he knew of anyone to whom I should
talk about Adirondack chairs. His wife walked in, and he turned to her and asked, “You know
anyone who knows anything about Westport chairs?”
So the first thing I learned was: In Westport, you don’t call them Adirondack chairs. (I’d learn later
that you don’t call them Adirondack chairs in Ontario, either. There, they’re called Muskoka chairs.)
Westport is a quiet village that slouches along the shores of Lake Champlain, with breathtaking
views of Vermont’s Green Mountains across the way. It has an 1880s library and a 1960s post office,
and great, sloping lawns everywhere. That’s pretty much how it should be. The well-tended lawn is
to Adirondack chairs what the savannah is to lions: their natural habitat, where you expect to see
them ranging freely.
Wheeler directed me to Bruce Ware, who’s been a real-estate agent in Westport for many years. He
filled me in on the history. Ware told me that Thomas Lee had a local hunting buddy named Harry
Bunnell who was having trouble making ends meet during the long winters. Lee suggested he start
making and selling his chairs. Bunnell did, perhaps a bit too eagerly. In 1905 he had the chairs
patented under his own name and then started a manufacturing operation. (The patent reads, in part:
“The object of this invention is a chair of the bungalow type adapted for use on porches, lawns, at
camps, and also adapted to be converted into an invalid’s chair. A further object of the invention is
to produce a strong, durable chair adapted to withstand rough usage and exposure to the weather.”)
The Bunnell chairs are suspiciously similar to Lee’s Westport chairs, but the long, rearward-facing
back legs are more narrowly set than on Lee’s chairs. Ware has a Bunnell chair in his office across
the street from his house. We walked over and examined it. Ware lifted an arm of the chair, then
lifted an eyebrow. “It’s got stability problems,” he said, ominously. I detected a trace of longstanding
grievance between the Lee and Bunnell clans.
The Westport/Bunnell chairs wasted little time before migrating out of Westport. I drove around
the south end of Lake Champlain and up to the Basin Harbor Club in Ferrisburgh, Vermont, on the
water about seven miles west of downtown Vergennes. Basin Harbor is an old-fashioned summer
resort and could serve as a sort of Westport Chair National Park. On its 700 acres I found about 200
brightly painted Westport chairs scattered about, as they have been since the Beach family first
started making them for the resort in 1909.
The Basin Harbor version has a single plank for a back, capped with a graceful semicircular crown;
four slats make up the seat. They’re still made by hand using the original plans, which current resort
owner Bob Beach informed me involved 17 parts and 55 screws.
Their placement here is unrivaled; most overlook a circular cove, a shimmering lake beyond, and
then the bluish hills along the water. “They’re very comfortable to sit in and watch the lake go by,”
Beach said. “The view has never really changed.”
I walked around the property and saw guests sitting and reading and generally having the precise
opposite of a riotous time. I found a chair (dark green) and took a seat for a while. The Basin
Harbor variation, it turns out, is somewhat smaller than I prefer; I felt I wasn’t so much being
embraced by it as walking arm in arm with it. Also, the arms were relatively narrow (scarcely enough
room to lay down a paperback book), and they committed the great sin of angling downward toward
the rear. It wasn’t hard to imagine that a slight jostle could cause a cocktail placed there to begin a
slow, gravity-powered migration toward the lawn, resulting in a tragic denouement. I asked Beach
about it. “That’s an excellent point, and I don’t know,” he said. “We just haven’t changed the
design.”
Others have changed the design. The single-plank Westport back morphed into the multislat back of
the Adirondack chair, sometimes fan-shaped and sometimes not. Sometimes playful shapes
(sailboats, pine trees) are jigsawed off the back slats, and some chairs come with attachable slatted
ottomans. I’ve seen others made with big circular backs, giving them the appearance of large light
bulbs, and still others with squiggly, irregular slats, giving them an informal, rakish appearance.
Ingenious systems have been devised to allow them to fold up, thus requiring less winter hibernation
space. And I have in front of me U.S. design patent number D503,550 from 2005, with a diagram
featuring chutes and levers and slats that when properly assembled result in a “combined beerdispensing cooler and lawn chair.”
Bad Adirondack chairs are bad each in its own way. But all good Adirondack chairs have one thing
in common: They possess their own gravitational field, and they pull you inexorably into their orbit.
“They become their own destination,” is how Zeke Leonard puts it. “They start to define a social
space that’s at some remove from the main house.” Leonard is a furniture maker in Fall River,
Massachusetts; he also teaches from time to time at the Rhode Island School of Design, his alma
mater. He’s thought about Adirondack chairs more than most of us, since they were a focus of his
master’s thesis. (So was the dining-room table; he’s interested in furniture that encourages you to
slow down your life.)
Perhaps it’s because they engulf you, or that the backs are sharply angled, but Leonard notes that
Adirondack chairs are usually not for socializing. “It’s hard to talk to people when you sit in them,”
he says. “The seat pitch is steep enough that you’ve got to lean forward, and so it’s not conducive to
talking. But it makes a great place to sit and read a book or listen to a game.”
People will at times put them in a cluster, and more people will show up than there are chairs to seat
them. The arms are broad enough that a late arrival can perch on an arm, creating instant multilevel
seating. That’s good for making a short-term connection–discussing dinner plans or watching the
sun slip over the hills–but not for a long discourse. It’s best to avoid this sort of arrangement.
The best arrangement, I’m convinced, is two Adirondack chairs off by themselves. Sit in them with a
friend or lover, and you’re simultaneously by yourself and with another. It’s the best approximation
of real life that I can imagine.
The Adirondack chair’s ability to carve out a personal space amid a public one brings me to another
minor point: I’ve lately seen an epidemic of child-sized chairs. This may make me sound like a crank,
but I’m wholly opposed to them.
Full-sized chairs are perfect not just for adults, but also for kids. Watch a 5-year-old climb up and
into a full-scale chair, and that little one quickly gets lost in his or her imagination. The chair
becomes a castle, a fort, a villa on a lake. The miniature versions make adults happy when they can
gaze adoringly at kids sitting in them–so cute!–but notice that the kids invariably look pained, as if
wearing shoes too small.
The Goldilocks Project had its most significant breakthrough in Nova Scotia a few years ago. I was
driving west from Lunenburg, and what should I see but a grand arc of colorful Adirondack chairs
arrayed on a lawn next to a house in the village of Upper LaHave.
A sign indicated that this was Zwicker Woodworking, a moderately large backyard operation. The
chairs were painted in what Frank Lloyd Wright used to dismissively call the “colors of the ribbon
counter.” They were solid, with fan backs, very broad arms, and nicely cambered seats.
Of course, I stopped and sat. The Adirondack chair, like wine, has an entry, body, and finish. The
Zwicker chairs’ entry was excellent; I stopped leaning back at precisely the point I should. My knees
came up to exactly the right height. I didn’t require an assist from a passing person to stand up. The
chairs didn’t feel too rigid–not too oaky, in other words. They were very reasonably priced.
I immediately bought one, which I secured upright to the top of my Volkswagen van for the drive
home. Like local druggists’ delivery vehicles, which once had a mortar and pestle on their roofs, my
van with its iconic chair made me look like a vendor of summer leisure as I drove home. The honks
and thumbs-up from passing cars never ceased. Two years later I went back and bought three more.
That was about eight years ago. The chairs now spend the summers at a lake in eastern Maine,
which, not coincidentally, is where I also spend my summers. I put two in a clearing just below the
house, and two down a path near the water.
An Adirondack chair deteriorates slowly but steadily. I believe an Adirondack chair year is equal to
about seven human years–that is, if one lasts a decade outside, it’s doing pretty well. The feet go
first, and start to get punky where they sit on the damp lawn all summer. You can trim and repaint
them to slow the process; they get shorter, lower to the ground, harder to get out of.
Then the joints start to go: Where the slats are screwed in, a bit of rot forms. The paint comes off,
sometimes revealing unfortunate fashions of the past–like the time you decided to paint them lime
green during that one really long, hot summer.
And finally–usually when somebody you don’t know very well is visiting–he sits down heavily and
the chair starts to drift sideways and your guest says, “Uh-oh!”
And then the whole chair deconstructs and becomes a pile of boards. Then you cart it off to the
dump or burn it in the next bonfire.
And that’s okay. Because here’s the thing about the Goldilocks Project: There’s never an end to it.
Looking for “just right” becomes a calling. When the last chair goes, there’s always a new one
waiting to be discovered. And that keeps me going.