Steelcase Gesture Office Chair Review 2024

Are you in the market for a great office chair that will last you for years and is engineered to provide a comfortable seating experience that will help improve your posture?

If you answered yes, then you’re going to like what you read in this—our Steelcase Gesture review.

There are a handful of big, well-respected companies in office furniture, and Steelcase is at the top of that list. You’ll pay a hefty premium for a Steelcase chair, but you’ll get something that’s incredibly durable, full-featured, and comfortable.

Before we get into the particulars here, we should also mention that the Gesture isn’t a single product but a family of chairs (and one stool) all under the Gesture umbrella. 

That matters because if you do a Google search for this chair to get more information, you’re likely to see all sorts of references, including links to:

And a few others besides. 

It can all be very confusing.

This is driven by the fact that the Gesture has tons of different options you can opt to include when you make your purchase, and depending on the options you buy, you can tweak or slant the chair to make it better suited for gaming or standard office work, or whatever.

It’s also worth mentioning that despite the various ways you’ll see the Steelcase Gesture described, at the end of the day, there are really only two different chair chassis that drive the model’s large number of variations.

In the sections that follow, we’ll step you through everything the Gesture has to offer and give you all the details, so you’ll be able to decide for yourself if this is the chair you’re looking for and have a decent idea about which options and accessories you’ll be most interested in. If your interest is piqued and you’re curious to know more, read on, and let’s take a closer look!

An Overview Of The Steelcase Gesture Office Desk Chair With Headrest Plus Lumbar Support

This is an exceptionally strong component of our Steelcase Gesture review. Not only does Steelcase have decades of experience building office furniture but they’ve also got some of the best design teams in the industry.  

Aesthetically, the Gesture has a really interesting look. In some ways, it’s got an almost retro appearance that is reminiscent of a chair you might see in the 1960s, while in other respects, it strikes a vaguely futuristic tone. We’d call it “Retro-Futurist” then.

We love it, but clearly, the overall appearance of the chair won’t be for everyone. And if you’re looking for a chair designed along purely conventional lines so that it will politely vanish into the background, then this chair is probably not for you.

We mentioned in the last section that the Gesture product line can be defined by two chassis—an office chair and a stool.

With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at the raw numbers that drive and define both of the main variations of the Gesture. Here’s what the chair looks like, by the numbers:

These are categorically excellent numbers. The first thing you’ll notice is that virtually every aspect of the Gesture’s chair frame is adjustable. Both the seat width and depth being adjustable is fantastic and something you almost never see on an office chair offered at any height.

The seat height adjustment range is also superb, straddling either side of big and tall territory, which typically starts at 18″ and goes up from there, so the Gesture is a good fit for shorter as well as taller folk. And on top of that, the supported weight limit is fantastic, making the gesture capable of accommodating the vast majority of potential purchasers.

Now let’s take a look at the same basic numbers, but for the stool chassis:

As you can see, these numbers are broadly similar to the first set, with the big differences being the seat height adjustment range and the overall height of the stool, which is exactly what you’d expect. Again, these numbers are categorically superb.

If you decide you want one of these, the first decision you’ll need to make is whether you want to get the stool chassis or the office chair chassis.  

Once you’ve decided on that, you’ll want to decide whether you want your Gesture with a wrapped back or without. There’s really no “right” answer here. It’s just a question of what kind of stool or chair you’re ultimately trying to create for yourself.

Those decisions, however, represent just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. In the next section, we’ll outline the rest of the ordering process and the wide range of decisions a prospective buyer has to make.

You Can Get Your Steelcase Gesture Office Chair Any Way You Want It!

Let’s assume for a moment that you’ve already decided you want one of these, and you’ve made the first couple of basic decisions (office chair chassis vs. stool chassis and some of the other basic decisions).  

After that, the next big thing is to decide on the type of upholstery you want. You can choose from either fabric or leather. If you opt for fabric, you have the following color options to choose from:

Era Fabrics

Cogent Fabrics

If you opt for leather upholstery, your color options are a bit more limited, with the following available:

In addition to that, you can also select the color scheme for your frame, choosing from black seat, back, and arms; a platinum metallic frame with seagull colored seat and back and merle arms; or a platinum metallic frame with merle seat, back, and arms. 

Where the base is concerned, you can either order that to match the color choices you selected for the frame or go with polished aluminum.

Finally, you can opt for additional lumbar support or not and select what kind of casters you prefer. 

Where the casters are concerned, you can opt either for those optimized for carpet or hardwoods.

As you can see, the number of customization and personalization options you have available here is next-level good. The amount of fine-tuning you can do is out of this world.

The Steelcase Gesture Chair Is Delightfully Adjustable

This is another incredibly strong component of our Steelcase Gesture review. In the last section, we mentioned that just about everything about the Steelcase Gesture is adjustable, including the seat depth, seat height, and seat width.

You can also adjust the back tension, which controls how much force is required to recline back in the chair, or if you don’t want to be able to recline or you want to recline and stop at a certain point, there’s a control knob for that too.

On top of that, the armrests are incredibly adjustable. In fact, the “limb interface”—as the company describes it—has a full 360 degrees of motion, allowing you to set it to any angle you desire.

You can also order an optional headrest, and if you do, it can also be height and angle adjusted.

The heart and soul of the design, though, lies in its “3D LiveBack” system, which provides sagittal, lateral, and torsional movement while maintaining a constant level of support. 

Basically, that’s a fancy way of saying that no matter how you move in the chair, you’re going to have proper support at all times, and that’s awesome.  

Combine that with the fact that the lumbar support itself is height adjustable, and there’s really not much that you can’t tweak or fine-tune on this chair.

Extras On Offer

Not every chair offers extras and accessories, but there are a number of them on offer here. If you order the chair, you can get it with any of the following accessories:

For an industry not big on offering extras, this is absolutely huge.

Some Assembly Is Required

This probably won’t surprise you, given that almost every office chair on the market today arrives at your door in a box and in several pieces. And yes, that’s also true of the Steelcase Gesture office desk chair.

The good news is that Steelcase’s production values are off-the-charts good, and the assembly instructions are clear and easy to follow.

If you’re working by yourself, it will probably take you about twenty minutes to go from unboxing to sitting down in your new chair for the first time. If you’ve got an assistant available on the day the chair arrives, you can likely cut that in half.  

Variants of Steelcase Gesture Office Chair

Pros and Cons of Steelcase Gesture Office Chair

This chair has no weaknesses, save for its high price. It’s an absolutely incredible design that lets you modify just about everything. 

Not only is almost every feature adjustable but there are tons of customization and personalization options when it comes to ordering extras for the chair, selecting color options, and the like.

Unfortunately, sticker shock is a real thing, and if you’re on a budget, then it’s not going to matter how much you love this chair; it’s simply going to be out of reach.

Steelcase Gesture Review Conclusion

We love this chair. 

The Gesture is amazing, and its only real drawback is the high price. That makes it an essentially self-selecting product. You can either afford it or you can’t, and you’re either buying for quality and longevity or you’re not.If you’ve got the money and you’re buying for quality, this chair belongs on your shortlist of options to consider. We highly recommend it.

Other Options To Consider

If you’ve reached the end of this review and have concluded that you just can’t afford this model, here are a couple of slightly less expensive options you may want to consider;

SIDIZ is a South Korean company and kind of an invisible giant in the office furniture world. The reason that most people haven’t heard of them is that they sell primarily direct to major corporations, although individuals can certainly buy from them too.

The T50 is a tremendously good chair, and while it’s not quite as adjustable as the one we just talked about, it comes reasonably close and is a fraction of the price, to boot. Granted, it’s not as ruggedly constructed, but if you’re looking for a similar feature set for less money, this is a great option to consider.

The Hercules is a beast of a chair. Huge and heavy, it’s virtually indestructible and like the chair we just talked about, you can order this one in either fabric or leather upholstery, except in this case, instead of leather, you’re getting PU.

The upshot is that the chair is significantly less expensive than the model we just talked about, and the author of this review can attest to its durability. My Herc has been in service for five years and is still going strong!

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Official Manufacturer Support

References & Resources:

• Steelcase, Official Brand Website.
• Steelcase Gesture Office Chair User Manual
• How to Adjust Your Office Chair, New York Times.
• The Definitive Guide to Choosing an Office Chair, Gear Patrol.
• Research on Long-Term Office Chair Comfort Based on Posture Transform, IEEE Xplore.