One of my enduring Seattle memories is walking past the Victrola Coffee Roasters café on Capitol Hill and noticing a woman inside staring at me. For a moment, I allowed it to inflate my ego until I remembered what a casually dressed city this is. She wasn't checking me out. She was watching my freshly ironed shirt go by.
I don't love ironing, but there's a meditative aspect to it that I enjoy, an easy sartorial leg up, and the creation of order from disorder. Of course, very few of us have felt the need to iron our clothes over this past year, as our starched shirts and pleated skirts hang patiently in the closet while we scour the web for deals on track pants. But I look forward to resuming my biweekly ritual. I'll turn on some late-night radio or a podcast, crack a beer, and transform wrinkled and rumpled into smooth and soft. Having been an ironer for a couple of decades, I have opinions about irons and care enough to own a well-rated Kenmore. I dread dealing with wobbly boards and junky irons when I travel, quietly resenting their lack of steam power.
So I was curious when I found an expert-looking iron tucked in among the smart home products at a Chicago trade show I attended in the Before Times. The man demonstrating it blasted steam across the aisle and showed off a fan built into the board that, like the offspring of an air-hockey table, could both suck a shirt on top of it and lift it off the board's surface. I was fascinated, but the iron-and-board combo, dubbed the Smart U by Swiss manufacturer Laurastar, wouldn't arrive in the United States for almost two years. I could wait.
Shipping in a box weighing a whopping 57 pounds, the Smart U is a combination iron and board with a water tank and “steam generator” nestled between two of the board's legs. It's heavier, but not that much bulkier than the iron-and-board combo that you may already own.
At home, I filled the tank, fired it up, watched a bunch of technique videos, and got cracking. For most people, it will be both familiar and a lot to get used to. Yes, it's an iron and an ironing board. Whether you're a regular ironer or only do it for weddings, you've been here before. But tap the steam button on the iron handle that sends steam shooting across the room, and you may let out a little yip of surprise.
I got to work, moving through shirt after shirt and, being an occasional Airbnb host, started working through piles of pillowcases. The whole fan routine—sucking, blowing, then turning it off—would take a while to figure out, but the ironing alone was a blast: fast and turbocharged. The first thing I ironed was the dress shirt I got married in several years ago, and when I held it up after finishing, it was backlit and looked like church cloth. I loved working on the rock-solid board. I'm just over 6 feet tall, so I appreciated how high I could set it, a strange shortcoming in many boards.