Pepê Lima’s Jacob armchair doesn’t ease itself right into a room — it arrives. Designed for Indonesian furnishings model Blackwood, the chair took house three accolades on the 2025 European Product Design Award, together with Prime Design Winner in Dwelling Furnishings and the title of Greatest Furnishings Design of 2025, and one have a look at the chair tells you why.
Jacob is constructed on a elementary stress between softness and construction. The upholstery is rounded and beneficiant, the sort of seat that pulls you in earlier than you’ve even made up your thoughts to sit down. Beneath it, a stable wooden body has been exactly machined into sweeping, embracing curves that mirror the physique’s personal geometry. There’s nothing arbitrary in regards to the silhouette. Each radius feels thought-about, each transition from materials to materials deliberate.
Designer: Pepê Lima
The defining transfer, although, lives on the again. A cast-metal element cuts throughout the wood construction in a manner that would have felt aggressive, however lands as one thing nearer to punctuation. It attracts your eye with out demanding it. It provides the chair its id, a flash of commercial honesty inside what would in any other case be a purely heat, natural object. It’s the sort of element that rewards a re-examination, the mark of a designer who understands that restraint and boldness usually are not opposites.
Lima isn’t any stranger to that stability. A graduate of Centro Universitário Belas Artes in São Paulo with greater than fifteen years within the furnishings commerce, he sharpened his craft additional on the Politecnico di Milano, the place he labored with Studio Incontri on initiatives for Alessi and Samsung. That mixture of Brazilian heat and European precision reveals up clearly in Jacob. The chair speaks each languages fluently.
Customization is central to how Jacob lives on the planet. Leather-based or cloth upholstery, a variety of wooden tones, and numerous metallic finishes imply the chair can learn as a basic membership seat or a pointy up to date accent relying on the room it enters. It doesn’t compromise to slot in. It adapts with out dropping its character, which is a a lot more durable factor to design.
What Jacob finally achieves is one thing the furnishings world not often pulls off cleanly: a sculptural piece with out being unwelcoming, refined with out being chilly, and daring with out being loud. It sits in a room the best way a well-dressed individual sits in a dialog, current and unhurried, with one thing price saying.
