Designed to stow away in its own legs the Quadra chair from Therm-a-Rest aims to provide comfortable seating in a small and light package.
The hard red shell created by the legs of the chair hide the seat and poles. The instructions printed inside the legs guide you through the fairly easy process of putting the chair together with two front and two rear aluminium poles holding up the 600D polyester seat.
The result looks a little unusual to say the least but who cares if it works? The problem is that at first it really doesn't.
It takes practice to stabilise yourself in the seat and sudden or extended movements without prior planning are not recommended! The narrowly spaced plastic legs don't provide enough of a foundation and the inherent flex in the poles adds to the feeling of instability. Once you get the hang of not falling out it's actually fairly comfortable so this could be a fair trade off for something that's seriously small and lightweight but the Quadra weighs a hefty 1.32kg and although fairly small it's not really small enough to consider chucking in your backpack for a bit of extra camp comfort.
Therm-a-Rest produce some really top notch camping gear so the Quadra comes as a bit of a surprise, it's almost as if a rogue designer has run away with the idea of a chair stowing in to its own legs and forgotten about the basic principles of chair design.
At £100 there are some seriously small, light and comfortable camping chairs out there, our favourite of which is probably the Helinox Chair One. If you're thinking of investing in a camping chair it would be worth trying out a Quadra first to see if you can live with the instability issues.
