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Chelsea Collection

furniture

Where the seams land decides whether a curve reads as one piece.

Client
BoConcept
Category
Furniture, residential and contract seating
Year
2019
Scope
Industrial design, form development, CMF
Channel
Trade & Showroom

Constraint

BoConcept's catalog had no distinctly rounded furniture. Everything in it was architectural and harder edged, and the range needed a friendly, contemporary suite of soft seating to stand alongside that.

The difficulty is that a round thing set among rectilinear things reads as a foreign object unless something reconciles them. The collection had to contrast with the catalog and belong to it at the same time.

A person reading in a dark green Chelsea lounge chair on a herringbone wood floor.

Decision

The question was which rounded form feels the most inviting, seamless and contemporary, and it had to be answered against how furniture actually gets built.

Seams are the whole argument. A curve in upholstery is made out of panels, and every panel boundary is a stitch line a person can see. Too many and the form stops reading as one shape and starts reading as an assembly, which is the opposite of what soft rounded seating is for. Too few and each panel has to cover more curvature than the material will give. The work was balancing that count against what can actually be cut, sewn and pulled, then placing the seams that survived where they would not break the curve.

Proportion and ergonomics pulled from the other side, because a shape soft enough to look inviting still has to seat someone properly. And a soft form cannot meet the floor on its own, so a wooden base with floor sliders sits between the two.

The form is what survived all of it at once.