UPHOLSTERY

I have been working with metal for most of my career. The vocabulary I developed through jewellery at Cartier (geometric, precise, structural) carried directly into furniture. The Orbit collection, the Planetaria, the Afternoon Tea: all of them are primarily metal. The softness came from upholstery added to metal frames, but the armature was always hard.

The Anima collection, first shown at Alcova during Milan Design Week 2025, was a deliberate decision to reverse that. To make the soft thing primary.

Upholstery is one of the oldest furniture crafts, and one of the least understood from the outside. People see the finished surface: the fabric, the form, and assume it is largely a covering operation. It is not. Traditional upholstery is a layered structure: a base frame, then a system of springs, then stuffing, then a series of materials that shape and moderate the form before the outer layer ever goes on. The form of an upholstered piece is determined by everything beneath the surface. Change any layer and the piece becomes something different.

For Anima, I worked with Maison Phelippeau, a French upholstery house whose practice is rooted in traditional artisanal methods. The internal structure of the Anima seating  (the sofa, the armchair, and the occasional chair) begins with Vanadium steel coils. These replace the traditional eight-way hand-tied spring system: the coils provide the base tension, the resilience of the seat. Over the coils goes horsehair, a material that has been used in upholstery for centuries precisely because it does not compact over time the way foam does. It retains its volume and its spring through decades of use. Above the horsehair comes a wool layer, which moderates the surface texture and provides the base for the final cover.

The outer material is pure alpaca wool from Inata, a sustainable French textile brand. I chose alpaca for several reasons. It is extraordinarily soft, softer than sheep's wool, and without the lanolin that makes wool allergenic for some people. It has a natural sheen that reads differently in different lights. And it is a material with a longer history in South America than in European furniture, which felt right for a collection that is trying to dissolve the boundary between the designed object and the natural landscape. The silhouette of the Anima pieces, soft twin peaks with a central dip, is meant to read as landscape, as topography. Alpaca wool belongs in that register.

The making happens in London. Each piece is entirely handmade by Maison Phelippeau's upholsterers, working through each layer in sequence: the coil system first, then the horsehair, then the wool, then the alpaca cover. The production has a zero-carbon footprint, not as a marketing claim but as an outcome of the materials chosen and the way they are assembled. Every material in the structure is natural and biodegradable. Nothing synthetic. Nothing that cannot decompose.

The Anima seating is a limited edition of 8 + 2 pieces per form. The armchair (W1330 × H840 × D1150mm), the occasional chair (W918 × H557 × D723mm), and the sofa (W3100 × H874 × D1200mm) are each made to order with a 10–12 week production time. The collection is represented exclusively by StudioTwentySeven.

What I came to understand through Anima is something specific about the relationship between structure and surface in upholstery. In metal furniture, the structure is visible, you can see what holds everything up. In upholstered furniture, the structure disappears. What the sitter encounters is entirely mediated through layers of material they will never see. This means the quality of what is hidden determines the quality of what is felt. There is nowhere to hide poor decision-making. Every choice compounds.