La-Z-Boy Hyland Office Chair Review 2024

Is it time to toss your old office chair and get something new? Do you prioritize comfort? If you answered yes to either of those questions, you’d be very interested in our review of the La Z Boy Hyland Office Chair!

La Z Boy is a legend in the American furniture industry. They make great products at reasonable prices and know much about comfort, which you can read in our La-Z-Boy office chair reviews. The Hyland is an awesome chair. However, it has weaknesses, so it might not be a good fit for everyone.

Are you the kind of user Hyland was made for? Maybe so! In the sections that follow, we’ll tell you all about what this chair can do and point out the areas where it falls a bit short so you’ll have all the information you need to decide for yourself if it’s a good fit for you and how you plan to use it. Let’s jump right in and see what the Hyland can do!

Key Features of the La Z Boy Hyland Office Chair

Big, stylish, attractive—those words will likely enter your mind when you see the La Z Boy Hyland Office Chair for the first time, and it is all of those, for sure. Even better, it almost seems to invite you to come over and have a seat, and you can tell just by looking at it that it will be delightful when you do.

Chair Specifications

We’ll have more to say about comfort in the next section, but for now, let’s take a closer look at the stats that define the model so you can get a better sense of it:

Some notes about the basic stats. As you can see, this is a sizeable piece of furniture, but it’s more lightly built than you might expect. That’s a good thing in terms of making it easy to move around, but it does have a drawback in that the Hyland has a surprisingly modest maximum supported weight.

That’s unfortunate because, as you can see, based on the seat height adjustment range, this would be an excellent choice for bigger, taller folk, except that the weight limit works against it in that regard. It’s a great choice for taller, lightly built people but falls well short of being a big and tall chair.

Part of the problem is that La Z Boy chose to have this chair manufactured in China and imported. While Chinese production quality has improved in recent years, it’s still not up to the standards of most Western countries, so while the overall production quality is good, it falls short of greatness.

Comfortable Padding

Most people will buy this chair because of its comfort. Sitting in it is incredible, mostly because of the memory foam.

Conventional block foam padding is good and provides a comfortable seating experience. Cold-cured block foam is even better because it retains its shape longer and helps distribute your body’s weight more evenly, but neither can hold a candle to memory foam.

Sure, it’s more expensive, but if comfort is what you’re after, memory foam is what you want. Sitting in the La Z Boy Hyland Chair is like sitting on a cloud; you’ll love it – at least for a little while.

This is another area where Hyland’s design seems to work almost against itself. If you’re going to build a chair and pad it with memory foam, then, in our view, you want to upholster it with a breathable, durable fabric that encourages long-duration sitting.

Bonded Leather

The Hyland is clad in bonded leather, which is real leather but fashioned from scraps fused together. As such, grain leather lacks durability and suppleness. Even if you’re careful, it will start peeling and cracking after a few years of heavy daily use.

Worse, leather isn’t breathable at all. That’s fine if you only use the chair a few hours a day, but if you plan to spend six or eight hours (or more) in it, you’ll be a hot, sweaty, uncomfortable mess—memory foam or not.

We understand the appeal of bonded leather. It’s a cost-effective way of providing those looking for a nice leather-upholstered office chair that option without raising the price too much.

That works great if you plan to use the chair lightly to moderately, but again, this model’s padding suggests a chair designed for heavy daily use, and the upholstery doesn’t work.

Ergonomic Features

So far, you might think we don’t care for the Hyland, but that’s definitely not true. Sure, there are a few design decisions we find to be suboptimal, but make no mistake: This is a solid design. Nothing makes that more apparent than a look at Hyland’s trio of well-implemented ergonomic features. These are:

In our view, the waterfall-edge style seat is the best of the three, especially when combined with the comfort offered by the memory foam. If you have sore legs or glutes, this chair will be a lifesaver, enabling a productive workday despite those things. You can find similar features in office chairs for leg pain.

The lumbar support is outstanding, but its stationary nature limits it somewhat. See other office chairs for back pain.

The head and neck support is so good that if this chair reclined back farther than 120 degrees, it’d be delightful to nap in.

Adjustability

There’s not much to discuss in terms of adjustability, though. Of course, you can adjust the seat height, but aside from that, the only other thing on offer is the tilt tension, which is pretty minor.

We would love to have seen height-adjustable armrests because Hyland’s armrests are extremely well-padded and comfortable. Still, the way the arms are designed is not possible to make them height-adjustable, as they connect to both the seat back and the seat itself. In our view, that’s a missed opportunity, but it’s certainly not a deal-breaking limitation.

Does Not Come Assembled

As with almost every other piece of office furniture being sold today, if you order the Hyland, it will arrive on your doorstep in a giant box and several parts. This is a big piece of furniture, and we recommend having an assistant on standby when the chair arrives to give you a hand putting it together.

The assembly process should take about 40 minutes from start to finish if you’re trying to do it yourself and about 25 minutes if you have help. The instructions are clear, and the production quality is high, but the pieces are big enough to make solo assembly a bit daunting.

Pros and Cons of La-Z-Boy Hyland Office Chair

We really like the La-Z-Boy Hyland Executive Office Chair but don’t love it. It’s got good bones and is offered by a company with a longstanding, excellent reputation in the industry. On top of that, it’s got well-implemented ergonomic features and is delightfully comfortable owing to its memory foam cushioning.

All of those are good things, and it’s clear that this chair was designed with heavy daily usage in mind. Unfortunately, given the intent, the decision to upholster this chair in bonded leather is, in our view, a disaster.

Not only is leather a relatively poor choice in general for a heavy-use chair because of the lack of breathability, but bonded leather is the worst possible choice because it lacks the durability of genuine grain leather.

This is an excellent chair for light to moderate daily use, but if you plan to use it for six or eight hours (or longer) daily, you’ll be hot, sweaty, and worse, the bonded leather will start to crack and peel after about a year. It’s just not up to the task.

The positive aspects of this chair far outweigh its negatives, but even that fact isn’t enough to make it a good fit for someone looking for something for heavy daily use.

La Z Boy Hyland Chair Review Conclusion

La Z Boy is an unquestionably great company, and this is a great chair. Unfortunately, it’s not as impressive as it could be, owing to a couple of unfortunate design decisions. Even so, it’s an excellent choice for a person who:

If that describes you, we recommend the La Z Boy Hyland Office Chair without reservation. Otherwise, we recommend it provisionally.

Recommended Reading

Official Manufacturer Support

References & Resources:

• La-Z-Boy, Official Brand Site.
• How to Repair Peeling Leather, Hunker.
• How to Choose an Office Chair, The Atlantic.
• The Ultimate Guide to Office Ergonomics, ErgoPlus.