Apple is sparing no expense in building its new Apple Park campus which is commonly referred to as the spaceship. The company has earmarked a budget of $5 billion for the project. So when it came to finding suitable chairs for all workstations at the new campus, you can imagine that design head Jony Ive wasn’t just going to pop down to the local Ikea. He opted for the Pacific Chair from furniture maker Vitra. Each chair costs $1,200 and every workstation in the new campus will get one of these chairs.
According to Fast Company, these chairs came to Ive’s attention a few years ago when he was having a few drinks with industrial designers Jay Barber and Ed Osgerby. They had been talking about office furniture when the new office chair designed by the pair came up. The chair is described as “smooth” and “quiet.”
Ive was eventually sold on the chair and one will now be present at every workstation in the new campus. Apple’s new campus will house 12,000 employees so there will be quite a few of them. Not every employee is going to have a workstation but you can imagine that it’s going to be a very big order for these chairs anyway. The order quantity would likely have resulted in some discounts for Apple as well.
“The individual, high-quality components have a consistent design language, lending the Pacific Chair expressive clarity and precision. Its appearance is strongly defined by the backrest, which extends so far down that no mechanical components are visible from behind, with the exception of the base,” explains Vitra.
Given his penchant for clean and simple design, you can see why Ive was sold on these chairs.
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