A Brief History of the Lawn Chair

A pair of tubular lawn chairs, from the mid-1960s.

A pair of tubular lawn chairs, from the mid-1960s.

They were so well-built, so durable, that families held onto them for decades. Think about it. I know the set that hung in my garage growing up were likely there before I was born. Used every summer, they were still hanging there—worn but in great shape—when I went off to college. It can't be great for business to make a product that rarely requires replacing. Perhaps that's why the companies that made the chairs eventually went out of business.

By the mid-1990s, the webbed chairs' popularity had waned. You were more likely to find nylon camp chairs, complete with thin crisscrossed legs and mesh cupholders. Any traditional lawn chairs you might find for sale were imported and featured cheap webbing that frayed and steel frames that were not only heavy but also quickly rusted.

Inside Lawn Chair USA's Florida workshop.

Inside Lawn Chair USA's Florida workshop.

Those imitations of the real deal is ultimately what lead to one small company reviving the chairs. Gary Pokrandt officially founded Lawn Chair USA with his son Andrew in 2009, but lawn chairs have been something of a family business for generations.

Pokrandt's grandfather owned a company that made plastic yarn and waterproof webbing. “When these chairs were very popular, most of the webbing came from my grandfather's factory,” he says. But when chair manufacturing moved overseas, business all but dried up. “But we kept getting calls.”

It was clear that the demand was there, so the Pokrandts bought some old production equipment from a former client to create aluminum frames. They fired up production on the webbing again and started cranking out their version of the nostalgic chairs. Today, they make dozens of different styles and designs from their small factory in Florida.

Sturdy aluminum tubes are cut to length and then placed into a bender before getting punched with holes to assemble the folding mechanism. The most time-consuming part of the process, Pokrandt says, is weaving the fade-resistant webbing onto the seat and back in a hardwearing T-bar design. This is still all done by hand to ensure the exact tension needed for a comfortable sit.

They're handsome chairs that look a whole lot like the ones that were being cranked out half a century ago. Why change it? It's a design so revered, that it's recognized by the Museum of Modern Art—in fact, they sell the chair in their official store, right along Arne Jacobsen's famed Egg Chair and the Eames Lounge Chair. Not too shabby for something you sit on while drinking beer and eating barbecue.

Aluminum webbed lawn chair,
$59.99 by Lawn Chair USA

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