Availability: Online and in select stores
Average Cost: $210/chair, 105/tray
Product URL: http://www.keekaroo.com/herihich.html
Rating:

High chairs can be one of the most disappointing purchases of your parenting career. Go to the local mega-mart or baby-shop and you’ll find yourself browsing through mostly plastic monstrosities with plasticized or easy to stain fabrics. Worse, these high chairs are usually covered in garishly colored licensed cartoon characters. It’s enough to destroy the decor of any kitchen!

My memories of the high chair I had as a child are very special. It was my chair, my place to be at dinner time. My friends have similar memories. The high chairs we grew up with were something special, and I just can’t see children today having that sort of nostalgia for most that are available today. By comparison Keekaroo’s all wooden “Height-Rightâ€? chair is definitely a memory builder.

While most affordable wooden high chairs ruin their look with plastic trays, others are in a price bracket best described as “wishful thinking� for most of us. Keekaroo has set a great standard for wooden high chairs. The Height Right chair is a modern and attractive wooden chair with clean lines and beautiful bent wood accents. Its styling is reminiscent of Scandinavian modern.
Though it has some quirks, overall is a beautiful piece of furniture that can last your family through multiple generations.

UNIQUE ASPECTS

The Height Right chair has a wide base for rock solid stability, and an adjustable-height seat and footrest. Studies have shown that your child will fidget less and focus better when they are firmly seated with a place to rest their feet. Instead of their feet hanging freely, or resting on a footrest that they have grown to tall for). The entire chair was designed with this in mind. I was a little bit skeptical until we placed my daughter in this chair and suddenly she spent 50% more time working on her artwork, and was happy to sit at the dinner table for a full fifteen minutes longer than usual. Her entire attitude shifted from “antsy� to almost mature. She focused on us and her meal instead of trying to rock the high chair or escape from it.

STYLE

The Height Right chair is a classic hardwood high chair that grows with your child. It combines bent wood rounded edges with straight lines and minimalist hardware. The result is classic modern, however this unit will comfortably fit into a wide range of decor from classic to modern and country to city. It happened to matche the wood of our table and “adult� chairs perfectly and feels like a piece of furniture first and a high chair second. This is a GOOD thing.

The Keekaroo design team came up with a form-follows-function design that is simply beautiful and driven by its functionality instead of the reverse.

OPTIONAL ACCESSORIES

Keekaroo offers optional add-ons of a grab-bar, tray, seat/back pads. Kudos to for the company realizing that not every parent needs every accessory they make, and instead letting you extend the chair’s functionality (read: age range) as needed. Thus the chair’s usability is from 6 month olds to 15 years (or 150 pounds, whichever comes first).

The grab-bar is great for seating your child at the table and providing additional enclosure and allows you to easily attach toys to keep your little one entertained at the table. The tray is wonderful for free-standing use, and I frequently use it to set my daughter up with an art project or snack while I make dinner and need her safely contained.

The tray is larger than most trays but not as large as the largest we’ve seen. It offers a wide swath of space that accommodates an 8×11 piece of paper for art time without being too spacious (and thus distracting and overwhelming for a small child that is just learning to feed himself). It is clearly designed for the arm span of the small humans that will be using it.

ASSEMBLY

Assembly took me about 20 minutes which included two minutes to reverse one of the back supports that I had installed upside down. (The only impact of this installation mistake was that the logo ended up upside down, and I’m a perfectionist and just couldn’t have that.) There are 8 wooden parts: the back, right and left sides, seat, foot foot rest, two back supports and a front support. The whole contraption is held together with a variety of hex screws and pegs. It’s all pretty easy other than figuring out which direction some of the parts should face in. The hardest part was keeping the little metal slugs in place, something that I solved by simply turning the parts on end so that they were held in place by gravity until the screws were secured.

The straps push through notches in the seat and use a plastic buckle that flips against the seat to hold them in place. They’re simple to remove when you want to remove them and almost impossible to accidentally remove. Pushing them into place initially or back into place after you’ve washed them can require a little bit of help with a dull butter knife, flat screwdriver or similar.

Keekaroo has their manual available on their website which is wonderful if you’re like me and always losing anything that’s not digital.

DIMENSIONS & EASE OF STORAGE

This chair does not collapse even though by the looks of it one would think it did. At 33Hx17Wx21D (less any accessories), it’s not exactly a “small� chair. However it is so attractive you don’t feel the need to store it out of sight, or resent the space that it takes up. The high chair we use for our younger child takes up less room and collapses but is so visually unappealing that we can’t wait to store it when not in use.

For long term storage it is quick to disassemble and store flat, making it one of the most compact chairs that I’ve seen for long-term storage. Great for putting it away to save for your grandchildren. Yes, you too will probably someday be a grandparent.

QUALITY & DURABILITY

When we first saw this high chair our initial thought was “Oo. That tray is going to be beaten up in no time.� I think I’m a little bit too used to the fake wood that’s proliferates the market. Keekaroo uses hardwood and with a fairly durable finish that holds up well in use and abuse. I pulled up their site to get some more details about the finish, and it seems that they use a nontoxic “low-VOC� water based finish on the high chair for increased safety and a lower environmental impact. This type of finish is supposedly less durable as they say that liquids left on the tray for a longer amount of time can cause the surface of the wood to warp. However, in our experience any liquids on the tray will evaporate long before they penetrate the lacquer. Just don’t submerge the chair or tray in water.

Our daughter has used this chair during finger painting sessions and meals, has banged keys, forks, pens and other objects against the tray, and has generally abused it in every way that a child can abuse a high chair. Three months later and a quick scrub to remove some dried on food residue and the chair is in like-new condition. Not a scratch or dent to be found. Out of curiosity I took a pair of keys to the inside of one of the legs toward the bottom, and it’s quite hard to scratch. Where simply dragging the keys across a fake-wood finish or plastic chair usually results in a visible scratch, the height right chair barely scuffs. And when it does, simply rubbing it with my thumb made the scuff disappear. More obvious scratching could probably be diminished with a small amount of wood soap or a little dab of oil.

If you use this chair heavily over multiple years (as it is designed to be used), then you’re likely going to want to refinish the tray at some point. Simply sanding it down and applying a coat of low-VOC finish should do the job. That’s the great thing about wood. It’s something that lasts with simple care. When plastic becomes scratched up there’s really no fixing it. When wood ages it takes on more charm and not less. Think “antiqued� not “shabby�.

VERSATILITY

The chair is rated to accommodate kids up to 150 lbs. This chair is definitely not for children that cannot yet sit up well on their own, as there is no recline. At 130lbs, I have sat this chair (tray off) a few times myself and found it to be very comfortable. As your child grows larger and his feet reach the floor you can remove the smaller seat with the restraint straps, reposition the “footrest� and use it as the seat instead to provide a wider sitting area.

All adjustments and assembly are done with the included hex wrench. Adjustments are very quick. You basically loosen the hex screws in the pattern shown in the manual, slide the seat or foot rest out of its groove, position it in another groove and tighten the hex screws in the opposite order. It takes less than 5 minutes to adjust both the seat and footrest.

The tray is a fixed-height which means that once it’s installed you basically have to adjust the seat to the right height for your baby to use the tray. This isn’t as much of a restriction as we originally thought it was, because as your child grows and the seat needs to be lowered, their upper torso stays in the same location and the seat and footrest just move down.

You can also remove the tray/grab bar and put the plain black caps into place when your child is ready to sit at the table. The straps are easy to adjust without a fight but do not “slip� with a lot of use or when your child pushes off against them.

PORTABILITY

This chair is by no means a “travel� chair, yet its construction makes it easy to move from room to room. At 18lbs the chair is a bit heavier than some but not quite a “heavyweight�.

SAFETY

The Height Right high chair is made of hardwood with a non-toxic low-VOC finish, which means that it excels in the “environmental� safety category.

The “Physical safety� category has some potential issues that come from the adjustability of the product. For example, you don’t want to have the seat adjusted in a way that doesn’t fit your child. If the seat is too low and the child too small, they could fall through the back. Used properly I don’t see this chair having any safety concerns at all.

I’d probably bypass using this chair with super-young children simply because of the three-point harness (as opposed to a 5 point harness) and the larger construction of this chair. If you do use it with a younger child it can be very safe and secure as long as you make sure to push the seat of the chair back far enough (it should extend a little bit in the back) this reduces the amount of room between child and tray/grab bar and holds the child in a more upright position and makes sure that the 3 point harness fits snugly. You should also buy the optional pad accessory to increase your child’s comfort and further reduce slipping risks. Children 9 months and up should be able to use it without an issue and without the padding as long as the seat and footrest are adjusted properly for their size.

One thing to note is that dragging the chair around by the seat or foot rest is not a good idea as it can loosen the screws and pull the seat partially out of the grooves which will cause it to fall if the child is doing what children typically do and pushing off the foot rest and pushing/pulling against the seat and harness. Make sure to periodically check the tightness of the whole contraption and tighten any loose screws. (This is a good idea with any piece of equipment that your child uses regularly.)

I love the stability of this chair. A lot of high chairs allow your child to push off against the table and tip over, or rock the chair to move it across the room. At 18lbs, its extra-stable A-frame construction, no wheels and wide base, the Height Right chair doesn’t budge an inch if your child kicks off or tries to rock it.

NITPICKS

Every product will have some nitpicks of course. You’ll laugh at this one, though. My only nitpick for the height right chair is that the tray has no lip on the back, which allows blueberries, peas crayons and other rounded items to easily roll off into the child’s lap. I realize that a lip would make the tray less comfortable for a child to use, but maybe there was another way to solve this issue- a slight catch-groove, perhaps? A single nitpick isn’t bad for an item that is in constant daily use.

CONCLUSION

This high chair is a wonderful piece of furniture with a classic and timeless design that can very easily become a family heirloom. At just a few times the price of its cheaply constructed competition, the Height Right is one of the most affordable wooden high chairs on the market. Especially when you catch the excellent sales/promotions that Keekaroo periodically runs. It is solid, durable, and constructed with such quality that I would expect it to be closer to the $400-500 price point (tray included). I would recommend it to anyone that is looking to buy a chair that will last their children and grandchildren years to come.