Sofas

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Superoblong

2004

A sofa system in leather or canvas constructed from polystyrene-bean-filled modules joined with heavy-duty coloured zips.

Timeline

One year at the Salone del Mobile in Milan, I’d had enough of all the elegant ‘international’-style sofas and thought to myself there has to be space for an ugly one that doesn’t care how it looks. That was the beginning of this sofa system that took its starting point with the famous Sacco bean bag chair. The bags are oblongular cubes in this case, connected by zips which give the sofa structure by holding the seat, arm and back rests together. Various colours of fabric and zip are combined to emphasise the zip-together nature of the idea. Most people are shocked by the apparent hardness of their first contact with the seat and don’t realise that once the body makes its shape in the ‘beans’, it’s actually very comfortable. Although the sofa has been rigorously tested in various ways, like sitting impacts of 10,000 cycles, and passed all of them without problem, I think the polystyrene balls may compress with long term use and the bags may need topping up.
Extract from Everything but the Walls by Jasper Morrison (Lars Müller Publishers, 2006)