Fun with Furniture

Yesterday we attended a Furniture Fair, featuring a number of Drexel-approved vendors. While we still aren't sure exactly how much new furniture we'll be able to afford as part of the move, it was a nice way to get started thinking about the possibilities in slightly more concrete terms. I hadn't realized the variety of options now available in the office furniture market - but luckily we now have something on the order of fifty catalogs to keep ourselves thinking about what we'd like.

While most of the offerings were reasonably straightforward, we did come across a magnificent publication from a company called Coalesse (Artsy layouts! Floating pullquotes in edgy fonts! Different kinds of paper in one catalog!). They described themselves thusly:

With products that fit as naturally in the office as the living room, Coalesse focuses on the increasingly growing similarities between work and life.

Gone are the harsh lines and glaring surfaces that have long characterized the workplace. Coalesse has replaced them with softened, contoured shapes that represent the new sensibilities of the modern way we work.

To that end, we decided we had no choice but to invest in this $12,000 chair for our new reading room:


I'm sure our researchers would appreciate it.

But in all seriousness, we did get the opportunity to give the treadmill workstation a try - and we absolutely loved it.


It would make cataloging and working with our accessions data a breeze - and we'd keep fit too! If only we could find a grant to pay for it...