Los Angeles Giant Chair

In Downtown Los Angeles, you can find a 40-foot-tall wooden chair in a parking lot.

The Los Angeles Giant Chair takes up six precious parking spaces in the parking lot shared by LA Mart, a wholesale market and showroom space for furniture and home goods, and The Reef, a creative conglomerate that encompasses Maker City LA (a co-working space), Magic Box LA (an event space), and the Los Angeles headquarters of Postmates.

Yes, that is indeed a Giant Chair. Photo from the author’s collection.

The Los Angeles Giant Chair is made from oak, towers 40 feet over the cars parked around it, and weighs a reported 24 tons. It’s bolted to concrete pilings and is wide enough that cars can drive right under it.

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Sometimes it’s referred to as the Giant Italian Chair because it was made in Italian region of Friuli by furniture maker Promosedia. Back in 2003, this chair was gifted to the Chicago Merchandise Mart at the conclusion of that year’s NeoCon, a furniture and design trade show held in Chicago.

But the new owners, worried about how the chair would hold up in the Chicago winter, had it shipped out to sister organization LA Mart, where all the polyurethane-coated chair has to worry about is near-constant assault by ultraviolet rays.

The Biggest Chair?

Even though it’s a really big chair, it’s not the biggest chair in the world. It’s not even the biggest chair in the United States — although it was until a rocking chair in Fanning, Missouri snatched the title by two feet.

But it is the biggest chair in Los Angeles.

Before Los Angeles Giant Chair arrived in the fall of 2003, the largest chair in the city was the 25-foot-tall “Seat of Design” at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood. This unseating highlights the continuing rivalry between LA Mart and the PDC, the two competing wholesale furniture showspaces in Los Angeles.

This all begs the question, “Where is the largest chair in the world?” As it happens, a 60-foot tall chair, a companion to the Los Angeles Giant Chair, sits in Manzano, Italy. And that just happens to be the world headquarters of Promosedia.

If you go get a look at this Giant Chair for yourself, stop inside the first floor of The Reef building and pick up a cup of coffee from Coffee by Kofi. The Day Dream is particularly excellent.