Sheet metallic has been a furnishings materials for many years, but it surely nearly all the time will get hidden. It turns into the inner skeleton, the underframe, the bracket buried beneath upholstery or lacquer. The design dialog not often begins with the metallic. Deniz Özdemir’s Arc One, an A’ Design Award-winning lounge chair developed in Istanbul between October 2025 and February 2026, turns that conference utterly round, making the sheet metallic your entire seen assertion and letting the leather-based cushions play second fiddle to the structural drama beneath them.
From the aspect profile, the Arc One reads as a single steady gesture, one floor that sweeps from backrest aircraft by means of seat pan and curls ahead into the bottom. No legs. No body. No secondary construction of any form. The bent metallic does all of it concurrently, and Özdemir arrived at that kind utilizing solely laser chopping and CNC bending, two processes that depart no room for the sort of hand-finishing that normally disguises manufacturing choices in premium furnishings.
Designer: Deniz Özdemir
Most lounge chairs are assemblies, a body joined to a seat shell joined to a base, every junction representing a manufacturing step, a possible failure level, and a logistics complication. Arc One eliminates all of that. The only-piece physique requires no welding and no mechanical fastening, which implies the naked frames stack flat for storage and transport, a logistical benefit that the majority furnishings at this aesthetic degree utterly ignores. Özdemir’s analysis documentation notes that this immediately reduces each manufacturing complexity and logistics quantity, and searching on the images of the naked stacked frames, the practicality of that declare is straight away seen.
A spherical tufted again cushion and a sq. tufted seat cushion connect to the metallic physique by way of leather-based straps with snap fasteners, {hardware} that belongs extra in a saddle store than a furnishings atelier. The strap particulars are seen and intentional, working horizontally throughout the metallic floor with small riveted or snapped connections that learn as trustworthy joinery moderately than disguised engineering. Take away the cushions completely, and the naked metallic body is a genuinely extreme object. Reattach them, and the heat is quick and full, all with out the metallic construction yielding something of its industrial character.
The cognac brown of the tufted leather-based in opposition to brushed uncooked metallic is a pairing with critical mid-century pedigree, recalling the fabric confidence of Osvaldo Borsani’s work from the Nineteen Fifties and 60s, the place Italian designers routinely married industrial metallic frames with beneficiant upholstery with out apologizing for both. The Arc One’s ottoman extends the household naturally, similar bent-base logic scaled down, topped with a sq. tufted cushion that mirrors the seat in a distinct colorway.
At 650mm extensive, 750mm deep, and 850mm tall, the proportions sit comfortably inside lounge chair conventions with out disappearing into them. The replaceable upholstery is the long-game transfer that the majority furnishings at this worth positioning forgets to make. Leather-based wears, tastes change, and a chair whose cushions will be swapped out for a distinct shade or materials is a chair with a genuinely prolonged lifespan. That call transforms the Arc One from a sculptural object with a hard and fast persona into one thing nearer to a platform.
