The River Runs Along One Side

FN Chairs started building chairs in 1995, in LaGrange, Indiana, and has done almost nothing else since. That narrowness is the point. A shop that builds case goods and chairs will usually be better at the case goods, because a chair is the hardest ordinary thing in a house to get right — it has to take a person’s whole weight, at an angle, several times a day, on four legs and a few sticks.

Freeman Miller started it and the family still runs it, with a second generation now in the business. The trade association that represents the Indiana shops describes them as an innovator in hardwood chair design, which in this corner of the industry is not a phrase handed out casually.

What arrives on our floor from them is seating: dining chairs, arm chairs, bar stools, desk chairs. They come in the species and finish you choose, which is how a chair like the Concord ends up painted black in one house and left natural in oak in the next.