In a Nutshell:
The Serta Style Amy Office Chair is an elegant, understated design with top quality upholstery and good ergonomic supports. Recommended for anyone looking for a tasteful, understated design that can stand up to moderate and occasional heavy use.
Value for the Money
Comfort
Brand Reliability*
Aesthetic Flexibility**
Overall Rating
4.1/5
Benefits
Drawbacks
Recommended For: Anyone looking for a tasteful, understated design that can stand up to moderate and occasional heavy use.
Are you on a budget? Looking for a new office chair that’s stylish and functional that won’t break the bank? If you answered yes to either of those questions, you’re going to be intrigued by what you read in our Serta Style Amy Office Chair Review.
Serta is one of the best-known brands in the American furniture industry today. While the company built its reputation on the quality of their exceptional mattresses, they made a line of outstanding office chairs where their expertise in comfort serves them (and you!) well.
The little Amy is one of the company’s smallest and most affordable office chairs. While it’s not quite as robust as some of their more expensive models, it has the basics well covered and provides good value for the money.
This is not a perfect chair, but it just might be perfect for you, especially if money’s tight and you’re looking for something that offers a good blend of attractiveness and functionality.
In the sections that follow, we’ll outline everything the Serta Amy gets right, and give you details about the chair’s shortcomings and limitations so you’ll be able to decide for yourself if this delightful little chair is the one you’ve been looking for.
Overview of Serta Style Amy High Back Office Chair
The Serta Style Amy Office Chair isn’t a particularly large or imposing piece of furniture, and it’s clear that the designers put more emphasis on function, rather than form. It’s designed along mostly conventional lines, but it does have a look of understated grace about it that makes it a stylish addition to any room.
Bonded Leather
It’s upholstered in durable, breathable linen, and is offered in a modest selection of color options, including:
Linen Fabric
This, of course, makes it even easier for you to blend the chair in seamlessly with your existing home décor or color scheme.
Before we get into the features the Amy has on offer, let’s take a quick look at the core stats that define this model:
The first thing that jumps out at us as we survey these numbers is the disconnect between the seat height adjustment range and the maximum supported weight.
If you look at big and tall chairs, you’ll find that they typically have a height adjustment range of 18” to 22.” At first glance then, the Serta Amy seems like a good fit for that category, but the modest 250-pound weight limit simply does not support that notion.
This, in our view, reveals the one genuine weakness of the design. It seems like it wants to be a big and tall chair but just isn’t rugged and robust enough to pull it off. As it stands, it’s a great option for average-sized to taller folks with light to medium builds.
That makes it accessible to a significant portion of the market, but if you are bigger and taller, you’ll want to pay close attention to the weight limit. The good news on that front is that there are tons of great chairs on the market that offer a significantly higher maximum supported weight.
Adjustability and Comfort
There’s not a tremendous amount to say about either of these aspects because again, the Amy Executive Chair is low-priced that it sticks strictly to the basics. Unlike some of Serta’s more expensive models that have cutting-edge comfort systems on display, the Amy relies on modest amounts of conventional block foam for padding.
There’s enough of it to make it a comfortable chair to sit in, but it’s far from what you’d consider an overstuffed chair. The longer you sit in it, the less comfortable you’ll be, which paints this chair as being one that’s optimized for light to moderate daily use, though in a pinch, you could certainly get by using it for extended periods.
The Serta Amy does offer good head and neck support, and it has a well-implemented, but stationary lumbar support system, both of which serve to add to its comfort.
Note, however, that this design does not feature a waterfall-edge style seat, which underscores the idea that this chair isn’t really optimized for heavy daily use. Spend too many hours in the chair, and it’s possible you’ll begin to reduce the flow of blood to your lower legs, which might give you that pins and needles sensation when you stand. If you do have to use this chair for extended periods, be sure you take breaks at regular intervals to stand and stretch!
On the adjustability front, the Amy again doesn’t try to do too much, sticking to just the basics. It offers 360-degree swivel, tilt and lock and seat height adjustment. You’ll also find that the stubby little armrests are independently height adjustable, which is nice, but the arms, in our opinion, are another point of weakness in the design.
It’s not a major issue and certainly not a deal-breaker, but it’s worth noting that the armrests are quite short, minimally padded and upholstered with PU. Depending on how you sit in the chair, your elbows might be a little tender by the end of the day until you get used to the realities of spending time in the chair.
Assembly is Required
As with the vast bulk of office furniture sold today, the Amy won’t arrive at your doorstep fully assembled. You’ll have to unbox it, sort the pieces, find the fasteners, and put it together. Fortunately, Serta does a great job with their instructions, which are clear and concise.
That, combined with the fact that their products have high production quality and the assembly process is smooth and mostly painless. Another thing that works in the Amy’s favor is the fact that since the armrests are only attached to the seat – and not to the seatback – you won’t find yourself in the position of having to hold the arms, seat, and seatback together while you wrestle to get the first fastener in place, which makes this model an easy one to put together solo.
From start to finish, it should take no more than twenty minutes, and you won’t really find that the process is speeded along by adding an assistant to the equation. Of interest, you can purchase the Amy with an “expert assembly” option, but we don’t recommend it in this case.
Not only is this chair easy to put together, but the price of the expert assembly service costs half as much as the chair itself. In our view, unless you’re just physically incapable of doing the assembly yourself, it’s not a good investment.
Pros and Cons of the Serta Style Amy Office Chair
The Amy Executive Chair by Serta is a good chair, but we wouldn’t call it a great chair. It falls just short of that mark in our minds. That’s not really a great surprise. It is, after all, one of the most modestly priced office chairs Serta offers and as such, it makes a few sacrifices along the way.
It’s not as pretty or comfortable or robust as Serta’s other office chairs, but even a modest offering from a great company like Serta is better than many of the chair’s offered by the company’s competitors.
In our view, the main weakness of the design is the fact that it’s just not built to support much user weight, and it’s not really optimized for prolonged periods of heavy daily use. A second, much less significant weakness is that the armrests are a bit disappointing, even if they are independently height adjustable.
Its biggest strengths are that it’s a delightfully inexpensive, reasonably comfortable and attractive chair, offered by one of the best and most respected companies in the business today. Those are good things and powerful advantages.
Serta Style Amy Office Chair Review – Final Thoughts
If you’re looking for a chair for light to moderate daily use that can sometimes be used for longer periods in a pinch, you don’t have a lot of money to spend, and you want to buy from one of the big names in the office furniture industry, the Amy is an excellent option to consider.
If you need a chair that’s capable of supporting more user weight and if you have even a little more money to spend, there are better options available, including others offered by Serta. On that basis, we provisionally recommend the Serta Style Amy Office Chair. It certainly won’t disappoint, but also, it won’t wow you like some of the other models available.
References & Resources
- Serta, Official Brand Website.
- A Guide to Calculating Your Standard Table & Chair Heights, Parotas.
- Bulletproof Decorating: Upholstery That Stands Up to Anything, Forbes.
- 10 Must Things to Know About Office Furniture Before You Buy, Residence Style.
- What You Need to Know Before Buying Office Furniture, American City Business Journals.