Ode to the Crate & Barrel Sasha Chair

In yesterday’s post, Amy mentioned her dining room chairs are the Sasha Chair from Crate & Barrel. This is one of our favorite dining chairs–great height and seat size for comfortable dinner parties, a beautiful shape, easily available through any store (and returnable if you don’t love them once they’re in your house!) and customizable with different fabrics, arms vs. no arms, etc.

Because they have a slightly rounded back, you often see them in rooms with round dining tables like in Amy’s room.

Love the added nail head trim on these ones (and that black drum shade with the contrasting interior is AMAZING! I actually just noticed that Restoration Hardware has a very similar one.)

This room by Toronto designer Jane Lockhart feels similar to Amy’s in terms of the soft grey palette and the dark wood round table.

In fact, I have the Sasha Chair in my dining room too, but with a simple, rectangular dining table (yup, Amy and I have the same pendant light from Restoration Hardware and the same chairs just in different fabrics! Fun to see two perspectives on the same pieces!) Originally, I had very high-back straight chairs from Room & Board with my table, but with the drum shade and a large round coffee table in the adjacent living room, I was feeling a need to bring in a little more curvature to my dining area.

While normally I wouldn’t recommend going for such a bold pattern because it requires a commitment to certain colors that you may hate in two years, I couldn’t pass these up. A little side story on how I got these for you bargain hunters…One day I was walking browsing in Crate & Barrel and saw six Sasha chairs in a bold red/brown fabric in the sale section–apparently someone had custom ordered them and then returned them. They’d been marked down a few times because let’s face it, such a bold pattern isn’t to everyone’s taste or could fit in everyone’s home. So, I nabbed 6 of these for $700! To Craig’s List went my other six dining chairs (for which I got $600 so basically broke even…and,yup, I’m bragging… So I feel like if I can’t look at this pattern in two years, I can always get them recovered.

And, if you like the chair, but don’t love the price, here’s a little tip…Home Decorators Collection has a couple of similar ones that are about half the price! Slightly slimmer profile that I don’t like quite as much, but for a smaller room, this might work better for you.

One last thing before I sign off–if you’re local to the Chicago area, there are two great events happening this weekend: The Randolph Street Market in the West Loop which is a great place to find vintage items and antiques and Expo Chicago at Navy Pier, an international exposition of modern/contemporary art and design.