Removing and Washing the Cover of Your IKEA Långfjell Chair

I recently changed my work chair from IKEA’s Långfjell to Martela’s Luna Active. The fabric on the chair was a bit scruffy, so I needed to clean it up a bit for sale. The problem was how to get the cover off the chair. 

Here’s how it worked.

Washing the Långfjell work chair cover

At first, I tried a little rubbing with the foamed dishwasher water on the areas where the grime was most visible. But it didn’t seem to be enough, so I thought I’d put the fabric in the washing machine.

I got sucked into the depths of YouTube videos, because removing the fabric was not as easy as I imagined.

How to remove the fabric cover from a Långfjell chair

Remember that the end result may not be what you want when you take the following steps. You may not even be able to get the chair back to the same condition as before dismantling. But if you want to continue, here’s how. Remember, you do the following steps at your own risk.

The main trick is to remove the whole mechanism from the base of the chair and cut small flaps in the fabric so that you can remove the fabric without dismantling the mechanism.

• Raise the chair mechanism to the top position
• Turn it horizontally on the floor
• Cut the bottom of the fabric to allow room to slip the mechanism whole through (image below)
• Remove the mechanism from the chair by unscrewing the four screws
• Remove the black clips holding the fabric to the chair base
• Pull out the fabric
• Wash in a delicate wash to prevent the fabric from shrinking

Here’s an illustration of cutting the fabric. So we had to cut the fabric, but in the end it was easier than dismantling the chair mechanism.

Remember these

The fabric is attached to the chair by strings that go through the chair. You must remove the black clips before the fabric comes off. They are both at the bottom of the chair and in the curved part.

Good luck!