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 will 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 Steelcase office chairs, but you’ll get something 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. Depending on the options you buy, you can tweak or slant the chair to make it better suited for gaming, standard office work, or whatever.

It’s also worth mentioning that despite the various ways the Steelcase Gesture is described, only two different chair chassis drive the model’s large number of variations.

In the sections that follow, we’ll walk you through everything the Gesture has to offer and give you all the details so you can 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, read on, and let’s look closer!

Key Features to Consider

This is an exceptionally strong component of our Steelcase Gesture review. Steelcase has decades of experience building office furniture and some of the best design teams in the industry.  

Aesthetically, the Gesture has a really interesting look. In some ways, it has an almost retro appearance 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 chair’s overall appearance 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.

In the last section, we mentioned 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.

Chair Specifications

Here’s what the chair looks like, by the numbers:

These are categorically excellent numbers. You’ll first notice that virtually every aspect of the Gesture’s chair frame is adjustable. The seat width and depth being adjustable is fantastic and something you rarely see on an office chair 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 and taller folk. And on top of that, the supported weight limit is fantastic, making the gesture capable of accommodating most potential purchasers.

Stool Specifications

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. The big differences are 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 to buy one of these, the first decision you’ll need to make is whether 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. There’s no “right” answer here. It’s 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 iceberg. In the next section, we’ll outline the rest of the ordering process and the wide range of decisions a prospective buyer must make.

Customization Options

Let’s assume for a moment that you’ve already decided you want one of these and 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, you can also select the color scheme for your frame, choosing from a black seat, back, and arms, a platinum metallic frame with a 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 for those optimized for carpets or hardwoods.

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

Delightfully Adjustable

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

In addition, 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, which can be adjusted in height and angle.

The design’s heart and soul, 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’ll always have proper support, and that’s awesome.  

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

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 huge.

Some Assembly Is Required

This probably won’t surprise you, given that almost every office chair on the market today arrives in a box and several pieces at your door. 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, and the assembly instructions are clear and easy to follow.

If you’re working alone, it will probably take about twenty minutes to go from unboxing to sitting 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. Its absolutely incredible design allows you to 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 real, and if you’re on a budget, then it won’t matter how much you love this chair; it will simply 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 are buying for quality, this chair belongs on your shortlist of options. We highly recommend it.

Other Options To Consider

If you’ve reached the end of this review and have concluded that you 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 an invisible giant in the office furniture world. Most people haven’t heard of it because it sells primarily directly to major corporations, although individuals can certainly buy from it, too.

The T50 is a tremendously good chair. 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 this is a great option if you’re looking for a similar feature set for less money.

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

The chair is significantly less expensive than the model we just discussed, 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!

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.