Andrius Virbičianskas

It’s been nearly a month since my long awaited Herman Miller Mirra task chair finally arrived at my doorstep. After sitting on it for three weeks I finally feel that I can give some sort of unbiased (mostly) review. But before that some background on what exactly is this chair.

Mirra task chair is made by a famous company known as Herman Miller, which specializes in various top class furniture, including seating. It’s like Apple in tech-world. This company was and still is praised for it’s famous Aeron chair released back in the year 1999. The chair is widely known in the programmer community as being best of the best. Mirra, of course, is no exception. It gets the same and sometimes even better positives reviews. Not to mention various awards as the best ergonomic work chair.

That said, the prices of both Aeron and Mirra are not modest. Considering the fact that they are work chairs, that is. While Mirra is cheaper and newer, it lacks configuration options. Aeron on the other hand is older and a pioneer model and it still cost 30% more. One could guess that’s due to wide settings array. After careful consideration I went with Mirra (I like newer stuff and I hate spending more than I need).

So let’s begin the actual review. The first thing that gets noticed is the fact that the chair is already assembled. Well, it may be considered as a good thing, but try finding a courier who would accept the box with a width of over a meter! Add the fact that I, with a help of a friend, bought it in UK, and you have yourself a nightmare! But that’s all in the past and when I opened the box I was greeted with a great view of mesh based chair.

The build felt really nice. With the exception of handles, they are not firm and somehow feel cheap. While this chair does not offer so much configuration options as would Aeron it still has it’s fair share of 10 different items. First, the handles can be turned inward/outward, widened/narrowed and of course the height is adjustable too. Yet they lack ability to move forward/backward and that’s an issue for me, because I like to stretch my arms a bit. And because of that I don’t feel like my hands are properly supported. Instead I constantly get the feeling they will slip.

Ignoring the basic option to adjust chair’s height which is nothing to add, the reclining locking mechanism has it quirks. For example if you set the straightest sitting option it still has some space for a minor recline. That’s annoying, but is fixable by tightening recliner springiness to the maximum. On the other hand if you like to recline, it works really well.

The chair can also incline a bit and this may be good for tall people, but since I’m of relatively average height, I have no opinion on this setting. The other less noticeable setting is an ability to adjust cushion’s edge distance from the inner part of you knees.

But the most interesting setting is for lumbar support, for which I still can’t find best position. It’s supposed to properly bend one’s back, but before I bought Mirra chair I had a habit of sitting partially laid so now when I have to sit straight, it feels like it’s actually making things worse. But I’m inclined to blame my past sitting habit, not the chair.

Overall I really have mixed opinion about this chair. Mainly because I expected everything being top notch, but you know, it’s life. You constantly expect too much. Maybe if I’d payed twice the Mirra price, I’d get THE perfect chair… Yeah right, no way I’m caughing up 1000 quid or more. For now I’m happy (almost) with my Mirra task chair and do not plan to change it any time soon. I am really interested to see how my opinion will change when I remove that bad habit of sitting not fully straight. Who knows, maybe I’ll will say that the chair deserves 11 points of 10?

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