My Clerkenwell Design Week was packed full of great design pieces and I’m usually focusing on one or two real highlights of new designers, but I was quite struck with the new designs at Knoll. Recent awarded OBE’s for services to Olympic torches something or other, designers Ed Barber and Jay Osgerby (yes, it is that way around) have applied their midas touch to a new collection of lounge furniture.
Featuring occasional tables and a stool alongside a sofa and armchair in variations, the duo have created a clever system giving character as well as function to the collection. Each piece sits on distinctive cast aluminium feet that slide neatly between its upholstered elements.
“Given a sofa’s scale and prominence in a room, we felt that the pieces should be formally balanced and calm, expressing their character through detail”, Barber and Osgerby say. “The design concentrates on comfort, proportion and the foot detail which visually connects the sections.”
Scaled for the workplace or smaller apartment, a smaller version of the sofa is available with pieces featuring a lower back and reduced seat depth. Occasional tables and a stool foil the casual aesthetic of the soft seating. A robust cast aluminium base supports both round tabletops or the round wooden seat of the stool. The geometric, elementary framework of the base is an interpretation of the familiar tripod structure; its tripod legs visually contained by two rings.
Armchair starting from £2,676.00 and available from twentytwentyone.
Photography by Ezio Prandini. Courtesy of Knoll, Inc.
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