Orangebox AllowMe Midback Counter Height Chair

The best stories start with a great idea, and the great idea at the heart of the AllowMe story emerged after Simon Dennehy and Phil Hamilton of Dublin’s Perch Design asked themselves, ‘How can we make a chair that beautifully mimics dynamic human movement?’

The practice wanted to create a beautifully simple chair that would move fluidly with the user… An ergonomic chair that would improve comfort and wellbeing by promoting continuous low-threshold movement and active-dynamic sitting, for any size or shape of user, built around pelvic rotation and hip abduction.

In their quest for enabling ‘applied human movement’, Dennehy and Hamilton took to their workshop, applying engineering ingenuity and creative thinking to basic modelling techniques and materials. The result was a chair back involving a single piece of geometry based on a helical sprung section, providing progressive resistance during the natural recline movement of the user, regardless of their shape or size.

The geometry of the double helix makes the back a thing of beauty, which immediately captured our attention and fired our imagination. With nothing other than one manual control in the form of height adjustment, the quest in partnership with Orangebox was also to promote better posture and comfort in a variety of typical settings from casual reclined collaborative sitting and right-angled task sitting, right up to an elevated perch touch down position.

The challenge for the Orangebox team tasked with evolving the design for production was, however, how to remain true to its defining geometric principle and spirit, while manufacturing at scale using modern processes. It ended up being a five-year development process; one which inspired and stretched the minds of all those involved.