Rummaging through old magazines at Humanscale's headquarters near Bryant Park in New York City, I find a photo of late industrial designer Niels Diffrient sitting on a lounge chair. This was no ordinary seat. It's the Jefferson chair, which Diffrient drummed up in 1984 for now-defunct furniture brand Sunar-Hauserman. To the left, a bulky HP computer (considered compact at the time) rests on a swiveling side table, and in front of Diffrient is a keyboard, coffee, and a pastry. He named the chair after Thomas Jefferson, who famously did his writing on a chair in his bedroom with his feet propped up and a work table nearby. In an interview with The New York Times in ’84, Diffrient says of the founding father: “He realized that the more comfortable your body was, the more energy you would have left for the thought process.” It is hard not to see the parallels between the Jefferson—which had a short life after its manufacturer folded—and the new Humanscale Diffrient Lounge. This is the last design from Diffrient before he died in 2013. This lounge chair, too, has an integrated, pivoting side table for your (much smaller) laptop. There's an optional ottoman for your feet, and below the chair are two USB-C ports to keep your devices charged. You can adjust the recline and headrest via two levers, and the motors gracefully move the chair into your position of choice. The Diffrient Lounge. Photograph: Julian Chokkattu Eames 2.0 The Diffrient Lounge is a new entry into the high-end residential market by Humanscale, the office chair company famous for the Freedom chair. Designed by Diffrient—kickstarting a long-standing relationship between Humanscale and the designer—the Freedom was a pioneer in weight-activated, self-adjusting ergonomics, now common across the office chair industry. All those levers and knobs under the chair? Turns out most people didn't know what they did or how to operate them. “Chairs are too complicated,” Humanscale CEO Bob King tells WIRED, which set off his quest to find a designer who could come up with a simpler ergonomic solution where people didn't need a manual to figure out how to adjust the chair to their body. Diffrient is considered the last of the mid-century modernists, and this new chair mimics the Freedom in shape. The lack of manual adjustability outside of the reclining mechanism is, once again, a feature. But this luxe chair marks a shift into residential work for Humanscale, which has largely catered to businesses looking to fill empty office spaces with comfortable seats. “When the pandemic hit, that obviously changed a lot of behaviors and expectations in the market," says Sergio Silva, vice president of design and innovation at Humanscale. ”Work from home became a much bigger topic, and we actually gave [the Lounge] a bit of a facelift to make it feel like a residential product for that reason."