lol for loll

Mother Nature is hard on outdoor furniture. Mommy Dearest beats wood, steel, and flimsy plastic with rain, sleet, snow, and ultraviolet radiation. In no time, out-of-the-box good looks turn into methhead deterioration with toothless grins. We started off with affordable, curvy IKEA chairs, but after a couple summers in the Texas sun, the damn things could star in the Walking Dead, arms extended, mumbling "Asses... Asses..."

I've admired the chairs of Loll Designs for a bit but had been put off by the prices ($600 a piece). But at some point, after chunking smaller hunks of cash down the drain for years, you realize: I could have had a Loll chair! So, nudged by a sale, we upgraded our outdoor gear.

Although the chairs are made of plastic, they are (cough, cough) guilt free in that they are made of recycled milk jugs. There are about 400 single-use milk jugs in each chair! They are also (and we shall see...) UV resistant. And to top it all off, the chairs themselves are recyclable. Furthermore, they are stout, made of panels half an inch thick. And depending on your design preferences, they have many style to chose from. Given the design of our house and love of R.M. Schindler and Donald Judd, we went with the Taavi Chair from the Salmela Collection designed by architect David Salmela.

The chairs arrived flat packed and thus required assembly a la IKEA. Loll conveniently provides the tool needed to assemble the chairs. I was able to put the chairs together on my own (with supervision from Mies), but some assistance from a biped would have been helpful: the large pieces are quite heavy. Our chairs seemed to come from two separate runs/engineering designs with one design resulting in better fits. The two "designs" look the same; one just went together tighter.

Once in place, our backyard patio really popped with these chairs! Maintenance is minimal: (1) clean if dirty, (2) tighten the screws if loose, and (3) shovel the snow off if it gets too deep (LOL for Tejas).
Loll comes from lollygagger and is made in the good ole US of A in Duluth, Minnesota (where they do have to shovel snow off the chairs). So far, these chairs have survived Joan Crawford. I expect they will have the last word.

two chairs per box

it's good to have supervision...

tool bag

provided assembly tool


the fastener slips into the slot of Piece A and then gets screwed into Piece B


1 comment:

  1. We had bright orange and green loll chairs/table on our rooftop deck in Austin and they never faded. Well worth the money.