There is a chair — you've sat in it without knowing who made it — where everything is right. The seat height, the depth, the angle of the back, the width of the arm. You sit down and immediately feel held. You stop thinking about the chair. That's the goal.
Getting there requires a discipline that furniture school doesn't always teach: every dimension is a decision. The height of a sofa arm isn't chosen because it looked right in a sketch. It's the result of sitting mock-ups of six different heights, noting what each one does to your posture, your conversation position, your ability to rest a drink without bending your elbow at an unnatural angle.
Where We Start
Before we design any upholstered piece, we establish the seating profile: seat height, seat depth, back height, back angle. These four numbers determine almost everything about how a piece feels. We work from ergonomics first, aesthetics second — not because we don't care about how things look, but because a beautiful chair you can't sit in for more than twenty minutes has failed at its primary purpose.
Our standard seat height range is 17–18 inches. This accommodates a wide range of body heights while maintaining the low, grounded aesthetic we value. Seat depth for sofas runs 24–27 inches, depending on the collection's personality: deeper for the lounging, cloud-like Cumulus; shallower for the more architectural Liscio.
The Galbe Arc
The Galbe sofa presented a specific challenge: a curved silhouette that had to read as intentional, not arbitrary. We studied the curve of a 1950s Parisian salon sofa for six months before finalizing the arc of the Galbe's back. The radius had to be shallow enough to work in a rectilinear room without forcing the room to organize around it, but pronounced enough to read as the statement piece it is.
Three different curvatures were prototyped. The first was too aggressive — it dominated a room. The second was too subtle — it looked like a manufacturing inconsistency. The third, which became the final design, sits at 1.8m radius. Deliberately curved. Deliberately restrained.
Tables Are Not Decorative
Coffee table height is one of the most underappreciated dimensions in residential furniture. Too high and it blocks the sofa visually, makes reaching uncomfortable. Too low and it's inaccessible from a seated position. We target 15–17 inches for all our coffee table designs, with the Socle series sitting at 16 inches — high enough to be functional, low enough to feel anchored to the floor rather than hovering above it.
None of this is visible in a product photograph. You only understand it when you live with the furniture. That invisibility is the point.
