The home office furniture market has been pulling high-end manufacturers toward residential design ever since remote work normalized permanently — and Humanscale is now making its clearest move in that direction.
The company has launched the Diffrient Lounge, a motorized lounge chair with an integrated pivoting side table, optional ottoman, and two USB-C charging ports built into the base. The recline and headrest adjust via mechanical levers, with motors moving the chair into position. According to the announcement, this is the final design completed by industrial designer Niels Diffrient before his death in 2013.
Pricing starts at $8,995 — without the side table or ottoman. Add both and the cost rises to $10,995. The version upholstered in Alpaca wool, as shown in product imagery, reaches $14,995. Buyers can choose from more than 300 fabrics and colors, with the swiveling table available in several woodgrain finishes.
The chair draws a direct line back to Diffrient‘s 1984 Jefferson chair, a lounge workstation he designed for the now-defunct furniture brand Sunar-Hauserman, which featured a swiveling side table for a computer. Diffrient named it after Thomas Jefferson, who reportedly worked from a chair in his bedroom with his feet elevated and a worktable close at hand. That original design had a short commercial life after its manufacturer folded.
The Diffrient Lounge also echoes the shape of Humanscale‘s Freedom chair — the product that first defined the company’s identity and Diffrient‘s long partnership with it. Humanscale CEO Bob King has described the Freedom as a response to a specific frustration: most people never understood what the adjustment mechanisms under office chairs actually did. Weight-activated, self-adjusting ergonomics was the answer then. The Lounge carries that same philosophy forward, limiting manual adjustability to the recline and headrest only.
The residential pivot is deliberate. Sergio Silva, vice president of design and innovation at Humanscale, says the pandemic changed the market in ways that pushed development of the chair. “Work from home became a much bigger topic,” he says, “and we actually gave [the Lounge] a bit of a facelift to make it feel like a residential product for that reason.”
The reference point the company keeps returning to is the Herman Miller Eames lounge chair, which currently costs roughly $8,500 depending on leather selection. Silva acknowledges its status directly: “The Eames is obviously an iconic design — it’s timeless, it’s beautiful — but it’s not something you can work comfortably in for a long time.”
The Diffrient Lounge is now available through Humanscale.
Photo by Pixabay
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