Replica Eames Chair: Discussions on Quality

The classic Eames chair. It never goes out of style. It’s beautiful and functional. In recent years there’s been so many companies selling replicas of the design, but I’m here to discuss quality. In an ideal world I would buy an actual Eames chair, because I’m all for quality and original design, but I just can’t afford to, even the vintage chairs in local antique shops are out of this world expensive. Considering I’d want to have 6 chairs in total for the office and dining area, the real deal just isn’t going to happen.

When we first moved into our place, we purchased replica Eames chairs from a local shop, they gave us a great deal because we purchased 5. They were still fairly expensive, but not nearly as much as an original. We’ve had them for just under 4 years and I recently discovered that one of them has a horrible crack on both sides of the back! It’s really sad to see this, but I should have known, the plastic was pretty flexible. Here’s a photo of the very sad crack, there’s one on each side.

I learned after shopping around, there seems to be 2 kinds of replica chairs. The kind we purchased are the kind I do not recommend buying. The plastic on the chair has a distinct texture (see photo above) and it’s flexible when you sit in it and lean back a bit, this puts strain on the plastic and overtime it causes it to crack.

A few years before Andrew and I moved in together, I purchased a higher quality replica chair from a local designer shop that was having a store closing sale, a white version with a seat made from quality heavy duty plastic and it has a super smooth finish. There’s also a huge different in weight, the high quality plastic is much heavier than the flimsy plastic chairs and has no flex to it what so ever.

So, overall, I urge you to test out the chair in store and take a close look at the materials it’s made from, so you don’t end up with a cracked back.

Here’s a photo of the 2 chairs in our office area, 1 is now broken which will cause a problem when we have guests for dinner, because we move the chairs from the office area over to the dining table.