Is that this the world’s most snug couch? Right here’s your probability to attempt it

RDI designers Luke Pearson and Tom Lloyd take consolation significantly. Over their 28-year profession, they’ve designed all the things from award-winning workplace chairs to airline seats and listening to aids – the place consolation and ergonomics are non-negotiable. So once they had been tasked by furnishings model Cozmo with making a high-back couch that makes you are feeling held, their design course of, they reveal, was as rigorous because it was tactile.

Launching in the present day at London Design Pageant 2025, the appropriately named ‘Hug’ couch was created in collaboration with Cozmo founder Jacob Peres, who singled out Pearson Lloyd as the final word connoisseurs of consolation for the venture.

‘Exploring high-back design was an apparent transient for us, despite the fact that it’s typically neglected in modern, design-led furnishings,’ explains Peres. ‘Low, slim profiles are simpler to realize, with interesting proportions, however we wished to tackle the problem. Pearson Lloyd had been the right companions. They mix first-class design innovation, magnificence, and magnificence with an actual depth of ergonomic information.’

The making of the ‘Hug’ high-backed couch

The method to create ‘Hug’ started not on the drafting board, however on the workshop ground, the place at their first assembly, in July 2024, Luke Pearson and Tom Lloyd confirmed Peres a ‘Frankenstein-like’ wood construction with shifting elements. ‘Hand sketching typically focuses on the seek for aesthetic, materials or constructional concepts,’ explains Tom Lloyd. ‘On this case, we began with the thought of consolation, which is a really bodily factor. The usage of foams and materials to create consolation and the exploration of posture and ergonomics is clearly difficult to discover or convey by means of drawing.

‘We additionally wished the look of the couch to mirror the consolation that we had been attempting to ascertain, he continues. ‘So we let the design as a lot as attainable mirror these early experiments. In an analogous technique to creating a good looking coat, it’s a type of tailoring that can’t be left to the top of the design course of.’

Because the design began to emerge, full-scale mock-ups gave the designers ‘fast suggestions’ on the ergonomics of the design. The key to the couch’s embrace-like really feel, Lloyd explains, lies in its excessive again – ‘a lot larger than different modern upholstery’ – in order that it cradles the again, neck and head.

In the meantime, its exaggerated lumbar help is built-in inside the again – a characteristic that ‘formed all the design path’, in keeping with Peres. ‘We realised early on that consolation ought to be seen,’ he remembers. ‘The proportions, the posture of the couch, the best way it holds itself, even the best way the textile wrinkles over feathers – all of that ought to talk consolation earlier than you even sit down.’

To attain the right steadiness between help and softness, its body is manufactured from webbed metal full of various densities of froth, reminiscence foam and a feather quilt. In contrast to a lot conventional upholstery, which is stretched tight and stapled into place, the material therapy for ‘Hug’ is dealt with in a looser and freer manner. ‘It feels extra like a chunk of clothes draped onto a physique,’ says Lloyd. ‘This additionally makes it a lot simpler for the client to take away jackets for cleansing or alternative later.’

Throughout LDF, ‘Hug’ will probably be displayed at ‘Consolation Lab’, an exhibition at Shoreditch’s Wax Constructing that paperwork the designers’ scrupulous analysis, design and growth course of, full with all the early scale fashions in addition to the full-size prototypes. Alongside this, Cozmo has created a movie that captures the method.

The showcase guarantees to offer guests a behind-the-scenes take a look at the quantity of labor and analysis that goes into making a settee, and crucially, pattern the outcomes for themselves. ‘For me, it proved {that a} centered transient and true artistic exploration can obtain one thing exceptional,’ concludes Peres. ‘Consolation and design don’t simply coexist – they inform one another. And that’s what makes this collaboration so thrilling.’

‘Consolation Lab by Pearson Lloyd’ and the launch of ‘Hug’ may be seen on the two^nd ground of WAX, 4 Backyard Stroll, London EC2A 3EQ throughout London Design Pageant, 13 – 21 September 2025

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