Earlier this year I inherited a Streit Slumber Chair from my grandfather (the bright green chair in the photo).When I got the chair home, I noticed the sticker on back that says “Streit Slumber Chair”. Guess I never noticed that before because the chair had been in the same position with it’s back to a window for about 30 years. I’ve been meaning to research the chair, but just got around to it this morning. Luckily there are lots of furniture nerds who love to keep track of this stuff.
Update: 10/22/09: I created a flickr.com photo group for these chairs: http://www.flickr.com/groups/1241484@N20/
Here’s an entry on the chair from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streit_Slumber_Chair
Here’s an entry on the manufacturer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._F._Streit_Mfg._Co.
Apparently the company made the Slumber Chair in a lot of styles for about 50 years. I’m assuming my chair was manufactured in the late 1940s or early 1950s.
From the wikipedia entry, I found the patents that Mr. Streit produced. This particular chair design appears to be US PAT No. 1,674,846 . Here is a pic of his original drawings for the chair’s basic design.
My chair has a broken recliner mechanism. The cross piece that supports the sitting positions has a small chunk of wood broken off. Now that I’ve examined it I’m pretty sure it could be repaired. We may get it reupholstered, but the other chair — victim of many cat-maulings — needs it worse.
