The design duo’s Almora chair won an award at IMM Cologne last week. Next week in Stockholm, they will reveal a new version of their Uchiwa chair. We spoke to Nipa Doshi and Jonathan Levien about their approach to design
At Stockholm Furniture Fair next week, Anglo-Indian design duo Nipa Doshi and Jonathan Levien are expected to reveal developments to their Uchiwa high-backed armchair for HAY, a prototype of which was shown in Milan last year.
Its shape is based on a type of Japanese fan – uchiwa – that is made of a circular piece of paper on a bamboo handle. It has an injection-moulded polyurethane shell with two types of upholstery inside – quilted for the domestic market, and durable foam for contract. The legs and frame are solid oak and there is an accompanying footstool.
The chair took seven months to develop, the designers say. “The brief was quite clear: we had to make a lounge chair that is affordable and the rest was up to us. In a sense, it was as free as any other project in creative terms, only we had to make a piece with economy of production in mind. Most of the work in an upholstered piece goes into the stitching, so we found a way to minimise this while coming up with an expressive gesture through clever pattern cutting.”
Last year, Icon met the design duo at the launch of its Almora collection for B&B Italia, which won the German Design Council’s Best of Best award for Interior Innovation at IMM Cologne last week.
ICON: Tell me about your approach to design – for example, how do you go about designing a chair? And how has your approach to design changed over the course of your careers?
Jonathan Levien: For us, the chair is a sculpture. It is an object and yet it also defines a space. When we start a project, we’re not really thinking so much about comfort and sitting. We’re thinking more about how we frame people in a space and how we frame what they are experiencing.
Our approach to design has evolved as we’ve worked for more companies. For example, working with B&B Italia’s team of engineers on Almora freed us to be more pure in our approach, as we were relying on engineers to make the dream happen. I think that our designs are becoming more daring, more complex and more inventive.
ICON: A lot of your products seem to have a story behind them. Is this an essential part of your work?
Nipa Doshi: In a way, the product doesn’t have a story outside of itself. The story is what inspires us to do a piece, so it’s something we build our ideas on. Almora, for example, was a chair from which to enjoy the magnificence of nature – hence the name, which is a town in the Himalayas in India – but also to spend time with family. I think the story guides the essence of a project – its identity, its materiality, the feeling. In the end, the customer feels the story, even though they might not know it. And they put their own experiences and their own stories into the object as well.