A sofa can be a place to listen to music, watch a film, read a book, sleep, share a conversation, or simply enrich a space. A sofa can be designed around any one of these purposes, and many are.
This sofa, however, was conceived around a different idea: to remain, timelessly, in its place.
We wanted to move beyond an age of disposability. Today, we might call that sustainability.
For a sofa to remain with its owner for 10, 50, even 100 years, it must first be a design that does not grow tiresome. Because everyone uses a sofa differently, it must also be versatile rather than tailored to a single purpose. Its materials must be exceptionally durable. Its construction must rely not on mass production, but on careful craftsmanship. And above all, it must possess a dignity capable of enduring the passage of time.
Yet although this was the fifth sofa I ever designed, more than twenty years passed before it could finally be brought into production.
Simple, yet extraordinarily durable. When you think about it, perhaps that is the ultimate sofa.
The challenge was finding the people capable of making it. It could not be realized in Japan. But an encounter with a small, distinguished workshop in Italy finally made it possible.
Now, I find myself at a moment I have waited for a very long time.
Among more than one hundred sofas I have designed, the fifth had remained an empty space in the sequence. At last, that gap has been filled.
Twenty years in the making.
I will not reveal every detail, but this sofa contains countless ideas and innovations conceived to help it transcend time. Perhaps that is why it seems to carry with it an unmistakable air of refinement.
Conceived over twenty years, created to transcend time.
The supreme sofa, “5,” has finally arrived.
