Where the Adirondack chair comes from

1903: a hillside in Westport

Thomas Lee's family had a summer house on the western shore of Lake Champlain, in Westport, New York, at the edge of the Adirondack Mountains. The land sloped toward the water, and Lee — by every account an amateur with a saw and a lot of opinions — wanted a chair that would sit level on it and let a person lean back without a cushion. He cut eleven boards from a single wide plank, tilted the seat, angled the back, and made the arms broad enough to hold a glass. His family tested the prototypes on the lawn. The shape they settled on is the shape you are sitting in.

1905: the patent, and the argument

Lee gave the design to a friend, Harry Bunnell, a local carpenter who needed winter work. Bunnell built them, sold them to the hotels and camps along the lake, and in 1905 patented the chair in his own name as the "Westport chair", apparently without telling Lee. He stamped and signed each one and made them in hemlock and basswood for the next twenty years. Lee, who was comfortable, let it go. Original Bunnell Westport chairs now sell at auction for thousands.

The 1930s: the slats

The Westport chair had a single wide plank for its back and seat, which limited it to wide old-growth timber. As that timber ran out, makers replaced the plank with slats: cheaper to source, easier to build, and — by accident — better at draining rain and flexing under a body. The fan-shaped back that everyone now recognises came from the same change. By the Depression the chair was on porches and camp lawns across the northeast, and it had taken the name of the mountains rather than the town.

Canada: the Muskoka lakes

The same decades made the Muskoka lakes — Muskoka, Rosseau and Joseph, two hours north of Toronto — into Ontario's cottage country. Steamships brought city families to grand hotels; the hotels gave way to family cottages; the cottages needed chairs on the dock. The chair came north with the summer people and, over time, took the name of the place it was sat in. In most of English Canada it is a Muskoka chair. Two names, one chair.

The 1980s: cedar, everywhere

The post-war cottage boom and then the 1980s deck boom put a cedar Adirondack chair behind half the houses in the north. Cedar is easy to work, smells wonderful and lasts a decade with care. That care — a sand and a stain every spring — is the part everyone forgot, which is why so many of those chairs ended their lives silver, split and behind a shed.

The 1990s: the milk jug

The first recycled-plastic lumber appeared in the late 1980s, and by the 1990s a few makers were building the Adirondack chair from it. Early boards were soft and faded. The material got better fast: pigment through the board, UV stabiliser through the board, stainless hardware, a density that made the chair heavy enough to sit like furniture. By the 2010s the recycled HDPE chair was the one that looked new in year ten while the cedar one beside it did not.

Now

Ours is that chair. Same eleven-board idea, same tilt Thomas Lee worked out on his lawn, made from about five hundred milk jugs at our factory in Texas, in fourteen colors, delivered free. How it gets made.