The England of my youth was littered with Chesterfield sofas, and in my mind at least it has become a symbol for all sofas and for the comfort of home. All this is expressed in the shape of the arm, which, as I thought about what to do, seemed to keep drawing itself. Maybe the memory of a hundred cartoon sofas was responsible. A sophisticated system of vertical sprung steel slats, interwoven with horizontal webbing, was developed by Egon Bräuning at Vitra, which allows the backrest to flex like a fishing rod, providing support lower down and responding to the position of the sitter.
Extracted from Everything But the Walls by Jasper Morrison (Lars Müller Publishers, 2006).