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The egg-shaped chair and easy-to-adjust straps make this Oribel high chair easy to clean up.
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Every nook and cranny of a high chair seat is bound to attract the crumbs and slime that comes with feeding a baby. But the Oribel Cocoon high chair, as the name suggests, adopts a curved, cocoon-like shape that leaves no place for food to hide from a dishrag. That same curved shape and three different recline positions allow the chair to be used with younger infants all the way up to toddlers.
Oribel is a company that uses kid-like imagination and nerd-like engineering to make products that grow with your child — and those roots show in the Cocoon's design. The high chair is versatile, easy to clean, and even easy to adjust with one hand (because once you're a parent, there's usually something or someone in the other hand).
The Oribel Cocoon is reminiscent of the egg chairs of the '60s and '70s. Besides eliminating any nooks and crannies that trap crumbs, the curved shape cradles younger babies while still offering comfort for toddlers. The chair can convert from a reclined infant seat to a traditional high chair, to a dining chair with its own mini tray and cup holder.
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To do all that, the seat of the Cocoon can recline to three different positions — a full recline for bottle feeding, a slight recline for young babies starting solids, and upright. The chair must be upright to use with the tray.
The chair is also height-adjustable, so that the seat (not the top of the back) sits at the height of a regular chair, roughly 18 inches, to the height of a regular high chair around 24 inches above the floor. This allows the chair to be adapted from traditional high chair height to fitting under a standard-sized table.
Like most high chairs, the Oribel has a wide base to add more stability, so that a baby kicking his legs on a nearby table can't push the chair over. My 7-month-old could wiggle the chair by kicking his legs against the table, but the chair stayed pretty steady. The front legs have wheels but not the back, so even with that kicking, the chair didn't slide away from the table either. While that stability is a must, it takes up more floor space than the average dining room chair, which is the norm with high chairs.
The legs of the Oribel can also fold in for storage — not nearly as compact as some other high chairs that I've tried, but enough to help temporarily save some floor space. That 32-inch base can be reduced to 17 inches with the folding feature.
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An easy-clean, easy-adjust experience
The Cocoon seat's foam pad easily wipes down with a cloth, and unlike seats that have a boxier design, leaves no corners or seams for crumbs to get stuck in. The foam pad is fairly stiff for the youngest babies, so the optional plush liner gives a lot more padding and is easy to toss in the wash.
The liner on the tray — which matches the foam seat pad — is dishwasher safe. The tray was just a quarter-inch too big from fitting in my dishwasher, but the placement of the silverware rack makes my bottom dishwasher rack slightly smaller than most. If you can fit a cookie sheet in with an extra inch or so of room, you'll be able to toss the tray into the dishwasher.
But one of the most annoying parts to clean on a typical high chair is the straps — I've had chairs in the past that were easier to clean by leaving them in the chair and taking a scrub brush to them. That's not the case with the Cocoon.
The Oribel Cocoon uses a unique system that allowed me to take off the straps in less than five minutes to toss in the wash, once I got the hang of it. A plastic piece at the end of the strap compresses a button and slides into place to lock in the strap. While a bit awkward to learn at first, once I got the hang of pushing the button with the strap itself to slide it into place, adjusting the straps to a different height or tossing them in the washing machine was simple.
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Putting the straps back on is easy — if you buckle everything up first. There's nothing to indicate which strap is right or left, so I put the shoulder straps on the wrong side and had to re-do them. "R" and "L" symbols would have been a nice hint, but buckling the straps in first before securing them to the chair works too.
The straps themselves use a five-point harness system. The shoulder strap slides into the waist clip, which then slides into the middle strap. That's like sliding in four buckles instead of two, but it's much easier to get a messy baby out of the straps with the shoulder straps separate from the waist straps. And, with older children, the shoulder straps can be removed to just use the waist belt, and, older still, the waist strap removed as well.
Besides the easy cleanup, Cocoon is easy to adjust even with your hands full. The seat recline position can be adjusted with one hand with a lever at the back of the seat. The tray can also similarly be adjusted with one hand with a lever underneath at the front, though this takes more wiggling to adjust with one hand than the seat back. The height of the chair and the folding feature requires two hands to adjust.
The tray can also be stored right at the back of the chair, sitting on the back legs and held in place with magnets. The tray storage is an unusual feature and nice for babies who don't yet need the tray, or for switching from finger foods to a recline for bottle feeding. The magnets could be a little stronger, however, since the tray did occasionally fall from the storage place.
How Oribel is different
Convertible high chairs are easy to find — and even convertible, folding high chairs. Where the Oribel differs is the modern design that also makes the chair easy to clean. Few chairs have eliminated the nooks and crannies that food tends to get stuck in, and few reclining chairs can be used with no fabric and just an easy-to-wipe surface. Add in the design that's easy to adjust the tray and recline with one hand, and the Cocoon makes the toughest parts of feeding a baby a little easier.
Every surface within reach of a baby's fingers on a high chair will get sticky. On the Cocoon, there are two spots on the chair that the baby can reach that aren't quite as easy to wash as the tray and seat. The first is the hinge to the legs, or the top of the A-shaped frame, which is right next to the tray at full height. A wet rag can easily wipe it off, but some chairs are able to keep all the support structure underneath so that this isn't an issue. Those chairs usually don't fold or height adjust, however, so the versatility is worth the extra surface to wipe for most.
The dishwasher-safe tray insert also doesn't 100 % cover the tray — there's a small ridge that will get messy and need to be wiped. A lip on the tray insert could have prevented that.
The footrest on the high chair also isn't attached at all; it just sits on a support and doesn't fit very snugly either. My 7-month old can't reach the footrest yet, but I can see it coming off with older toddlers.
The bottom line
I haven't yet met the perfect high chair — but the Oribel Cocoon comes pretty close. The cocoon-shaped chair is easy to wipe down, and (with practice) the straps are easy to remove and toss in the wash. The adjustable seat is also easy to tip back for bottle feedings, or height adjust for toddlers to sit at the table instead.
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There are two spots on the chair that can get sticky that don't just toss in the dishwasher or washing machine — though to be clear, aren't difficult to wipe down either. The tray won't fit in smaller dishwashers, and the footrest isn't very secure. But, those are minor blips on a chair that's overall easy to clean, versatile, and looks great too.
Pros: Easy to clean, versatile height and seat reclines, suits a wide range of ages, one-handed recline and tray adjustments, folding legs, sleek modern design
Cons: Top of the chair legs are within reach of sticky fingers, tray doesn't fit in smaller dishwashers
