The Ultimate in Patio and Cottage Comfort!

You've got your dock. An ice cold beer in your hand.  The faraway whine of an outboard engine, the cry of a loon, a cool late afternoon breeze on your face as the sun begins dipping behind the trees.  And you're sitting uncomfortably in a green plastic moulded chair you bought at the supermarket for $4.99. 

Wouldn't you be a whole lot more comfortable in a cedar Adirondack chair?

How can something crafted of wood  be so darn comfortable hour after hour?  That is the secret of the Adirondack chair which was invented almost exactly a century ago near the shores of Lake Champlain in upstate New York.  In fact, according to the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake, N.Y., they were originally known as Westport chairs, named for a nearby town.  A man named Thomas Lee, vacationing in the Adirondacks, designed the chair through a process of trial and error.  Each one was constructed from a single pine board with his relatives placing their posteriors on numerous prototypes before he came up with a winner.

Lee was a terrific designer but he was no entrepreneur.  When his buddy Harry Bunnell, a carpenter, was badly in need of a winter project to make ends meet, Lee helpfully provided the plans for his marvelous chair.  Soon Bunnell could hardly keep up with the demand! 

Bunnell was also a terrific carpenter but he was a little short on gratitude.  Without his pal's blessing he filed for a patent on the so-called Westport chair in 1904 and got his papers from Uncle Sam the following year.  On the patent description he wrote: "The object of this invention is a chair of the bungalow type adapted for use on porches, lawns and at camps and also adapted to be converted into an invalid's chair." 

The application outlined each of the 11 pieces of wood required for the chair and he concluded, "From the above description, it is thought that the advantages of this construction will be obvious." 

They certainly were.  Over the next two generations the chair's popularity spread across the Adirondack region, evolving through the years with slats replacing the solid planks.  The "Westport" became the "Adirondack" chair, so-called by tuberculosis patients who were sent those days to sanatoriums in upstate New York, sitting outdoors for hours in the comfortable chairs as part of their "wilderness cure". 

Bunnell continued building chairs well into the 1920s, all individually signed and made of hemlock, and you could buy them in green or medium dark brown.  Inevitably, these original chairs transcended function to become collectibles and objets d'art.  Chairs that cost four bucks back in the Roaring '20s can today, in pristine condition, fetch up to US$1,250! 

The next leap in popularity came with mas production and mail order.  During World War lI you could order an Adirondack chair kit, with untalented all-thumbs fathers across the country assembling their own cottage chairs. 

Somewhere along the line, the chairs crossed the border into Ontario's cottage country, the Muskokas, especially the Big Three lakes which were the playground of the very well-off, and owning one was a bit of a status symbol.  Here they became known as the Muskoka chair, even though the design is a dead ringer for the Adirondack, and it's still considered a necessity by those who insist on the traditional accoutrements of the cottage experience.

 Reproduced from the pages of CottageLINK Magazine (2001) and written by Glenn Garnett