Safia Elhillo’s Plush Office Chair Doubles as Her Portable Throne

What makes a purchase “worth it”? The answer is different for everybody, sowe’re askingsome of the coolest, most shopping-savvy people we know—from small-business owners to designers, artists, and actors—to tell us the story behind one of their most prized possessions.

Who and what?

The poetSafia Elhillofell in love with her plush cobalt velvet chair after plopping down in it at an estate sale and discovering that it was the most comfortable chair she had ever sat in. “I was living in Oakland and had just gotten married, and it was our first apartment together,” she recalls. “We had a lot of starter furniture that looked like it wasn't even going to make it through the year.”

Safia, who was completing Stanford University’sWallace Stegner Fellowshipat the time, was also at work on her third book,Girls That Never Die. She wasn’t looking to purchase furniture that day, but after sitting in that chair, she knew that she couldn’t leave without it.

The chair functions as Safia’s office space, as well as a place for her to rest and re-center herself.

When?

Safia immediately knew that she wanted the chair when she found it in 2019. What she didn’t quite know was how to go about negotiating. “I told the lady who worked at the estate sale, ‘I would like to get this chair.’ And she said, ‘You must be new to this. You’re not even going to try to haggle with me?’” Safia recalls. “I didn't know I could do that! I think she felt bad for me, so she kind of haggled with herself.”

The purchase price was based on one condition: Safia had to arrange her own transportation. Since the chair has wheels, and her apartment was right around the corner, it was a done deal. “There’s a video that my friend took of me wheeling it out, but the sidewalks were kind of rickety and broken,” she says. “I didn't want to ruin my chair! So I just went in the middle of the street to wheel it down. I made it around the corner and up to my apartment.”

Safia and her husband have since moved to Los Angeles and have purchased several beautiful pieces of furniture, including some antiques. But the blue chair remains special to Safia, and its extra-ness has, in part, influenced their subsequent furniture purchases.

Why?

Since purchasing thechairin 2019, it has become a staple for Safia. It is her portable throne, and she moves it from room to room in order to properly reign over her home. It is where she goes to write and revise, to rest and repose. For a long time, the poems inGirls That Never Dieexisted only in Safia’s apartment, with the blue chair being the only witness to the vulnerability within them.

Safia states that the plush blue cobalt chair was thecomfiest chairshe’d ever sat in and knew, then and there, that she needed to get it.

“That book, in a lot of ways, is a pandemic book,” she says. “I was mostly writing and revising those poems alone, in my apartment, in that blue chair, without a sense of what those poems would feel like being out in the larger world outside of my apartment. That’s never really something I’m particularly thinking about. I’m just trying to write my poems.”

AfterGirls That Never Diewas published, Safia went on an in-person book tour, which she hadn’t been able to do with her previous release,Home Is Not a Country. It wasn’t until she was reading her poems in front of rooms full of people while on tour that the vulnerability and rawness of them really started to hit her. “I feel like my inner self, and my life, and my body, and my personhood are all under the microscope. It really started to dawn on me that I’m telling people my actual business. Now that the book is done and no longer belongs to me, all my little secrets are out there in the world being read by strangers. I mostly just try not to think about it!”

But, when she’s participating in virtual readings and other events from home, the blue chair is her constant companion, a source of comfort and familiarity. It’s also often an icebreaker when she’s on Zoom; people are always asking her if she’s sitting on a throne. “I tell them that I’m sitting in my office chair,” Safia says. “But throne…office chair…both things can be true.”