In a Nutshell:

The La-Z-Boy Hyland Office Chair is a beautiful, comfortable executive office chair offered by a legend in the industry. Recommended for anyone looking for high quality, comfortable chair for light to moderate daily use if you can afford it.

Value for the Money
Comfort
Brand Reliability*
Aesthetic Flexibility**

Overall Rating

4.4/5
* Brand Reliability is a measure of the strength and longevity of the brand, which by extension, is a measure of the level of support you can expect. ** While aesthetics is a matter of taste, Aesthetic Flexibility is a measure of how easily a given design would fit into a wide range of home or office décor schemes.

Benefits

  • Well-implemented ergonomic features
  • Comfortable memory foam cushioning
  • Good bones and offered by a reputable company

Drawbacks

  • Upholstered in bonded leather which lacks breathability and durability
  • Not suitable for heavy daily use
La-Z-Boy Hyland Office Chair
4.4

Recommended For: Anyone looking for high quality, comfortable chair for light to moderate daily use if you can afford it.

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Is it time to toss out your old office chair and get something new? Do you place a premium on comfort? If you answered yes to either of those questions, you’re going to 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 a lot about comfort. The Hyland is an awesome chair, but it does have its weaknesses, so it’s not going to 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!

An Overview of the La Z Boy Hyland Office Chair

Big. Stylish. Attractive. Those are the words that are likely to 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 when you do, it’s going to be delightfully comfortable.

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:

  • Overall Product Dimensions: 25.75” x 31” x 44” to 47”
  • Chair Weight: 57.75 pounds
  • Maximum Supported Weight: 250 pounds
  • Seat Width: 20”
  • Seat Depth: 19.5”
  • Seat Height Adjustment Range: 20.25” to 23.25”
Left Image View of La Z Boy Hyland Chair

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. As it stands, it’s a great choice for taller, lightly built people but falls well short of being a true big and tall chair.

Part of the problem here is that La Z Boy chose to have this chair manufactured in China and imported. While it’s true that 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.

Adjustability and Comfort

The comfort factor is the reason most people will wind up buying this chair. Sitting in it is incredible, and that’s 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 of those 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 a bit like sitting on a cloud; you’ll love it – at least for a little while.

Comfortable Memory Foam of La Z Boy Hyland Chair

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

The Hyland is clad in bonded leather, which is real leather but fashioned from scraps that have been fused together. As such, it lacks the durability and suppleness of grain leather. After about a few years of assuming heavy daily use, it will start peeling and cracking, even if you’re careful with it.

Worse, leather isn’t breathable at all. That’s fine if you’re only using the chair a few hours a day, but if you’re planning to spend six or eight hours (or more) in it, then you’re going to 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 who are looking for a nice leather-upholstered office chair that option without raising the price too much.

Waterfall Seat Design of La Z Boy Hyland Chair

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

So far, you might think we don’t care for the Hyland, but that’s definitely not the case. 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:

  • A waterfall-edge style seat
  • Excellent lumbar support
  • And excellent head and neck support

The waterfall edge style seat is, in our view, 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 you to have a productive workday despite those things.

The lumbar support is outstanding, but it is somewhat limited by the fact that it’s entirely stationary, and the head and neck support is so good that if this chair reclined back farther than 120 degrees, it’d be a delightful chair to take a nap in.

In adjustability, though, there’s just not much to talk about here. 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, it’s just 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 in 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.

Front Image View of Back Side Image View of La Z Boy Hyland Chair

From start to finish, you can expect the assembly process to take about 40 minutes if you’re trying to do it on your own 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 we 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.

Back Side Image View of La Z Boy Hyland Chair

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 this chair for six or eight hours (or longer) every day, you’ll be hot. You’ll be 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:

  • Places a premium on comfort
  • Only plans to use the chair lightly or moderately every day
  • Wants the peace of mind that comes with buying from a well-established brand with a stellar reputation in the industry
  • Prefers leather over fabric upholstery
  • And doesn’t mind the extra care that bonded leather requires to keep it looking good in the longer term

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


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