do you have A shirt or pair of pants that isn’t quite clean but isn’t smelly enough to put in the hamper just yet? You probably just threw them on that one chair, right? You know, the chair in your bedroom or living room that spends most of its life holding piles of clothes instead of being a useful seat.
It’s this seemingly universally shared experience that inventor and YouTube star Simon Giertz wanted to solve. To do this, he created a Laundry Chair, the purpose of which was to organize laundry And Function as a chair at the same time. No compromise now.
“You can chalk it up to my reluctance to change behavior,” says Giertz. “It was one of those projects where I was like, I can’t believe this isn’t already a thing.”
Courtesy of Yatch Studio
After making a video of the chair being built more than a year ago, Giertz is turning it into an actual product you can buy. It started as a Kickstarter campaign — which launches today, and has already been funded — though Giertz says the plan was to build the product regardless of whether the campaign was successful or not. The starting price is $1,100, although there is a discount for backers (the first 50 got free shipping).
“It’s a little thorn in the side of everyone, an eyesore, and you have to deal with it,” says Giertz. “It was on my list of ideas for a long time – something that respected the job of the wardrobe, acknowledged it, and actually tried to do the job properly.”
The Laundry Chair actually looks and functions like a chair, with the main difference being that the arm rests are constructed in the form of a rotatable semicircle. A ball-bearing mechanism lets you move the rail around easily, like a lazy Susan. Flip it to the front, and you can hang clothes over the bar like you would a laundry line or drying rack. Rotate the rail backwards, and the clothes will slide neatly over the back of the chair, out of sight, leaving the seat free. Whether upholstered with fabric or not, the chair looks great with its solid hardwood frame and corduroy cotton upholstery.
Giertz has built a following on inventive, wild creations, like a robot that spits out soup, or when he turned a Tesla EV into a pickup truck. Over the years, he’s shifted his focus from building “useless robots” to actually building useful projects, like a screwdriver ring or a playfully maddening all-white puzzle with a missing piece.
