The enduring Nineteen Seventies Mah Jong couch appears to be on Charli XCX’s want checklist. In her newly-released tune, ‘Card Declined’, her buying checklist consists of ‘a purse’, ‘a persona’, ‘a complete new life’ in addition to the Roche Bobois, hippy-coded couch.
Mah Jong couch: a Nineteen Seventies seating panorama
A large composition of the Mah Jong couch upholstered by Missoni, photographed on the Roche Bobois West Hollywood showroom
(Picture credit score: Donato Sardella/WireImage)
The story of the Mah Jong couch began from an thought of German designer, painter, and sculptor Hans Hopfer, typically recognised for inventing the idea of a ‘seating panorama’. His first designs, created within the Nineteen Sixties for furnishings firm Mobiliar-Basar, included the Bausystem (1965), a streamlined couch mattress design, and the Mobiliante (1967), a novel piece that included couch, love seat and ottoman. Each ideas had been based mostly on an thought of important types, performance and responding to the wants of recent life.
This expertise led him to create the Mah Jong couch, for French furnishings firm Roche Bobois, in 1971. A completely modular, ever-changing seating system, the Mah Jong couch was conceived to adapt to the fixed evolution of home life. Bohemian in its execution and based mostly on consolation, sturdiness and adaptability, the Mah Jong relies on a system of cushions upholstered in daring textiles; over time, the couch has been dressed by the likes of Kenzo Takada, Missoni and Sonia Rykiel.
For Hopfer, the creation of the Mah Jong couch coincided with the delivery of his first youngster and a pivot in direction of interested by a chunk of furnishings that might serve the lifetime of a household. Initially dubbed ‘The Ceaselessly Couch’, a reputation that can also be a mission assertion for a design piece, it was later renamed after the Chinese language tile recreation its types intently resemble. The design of the couch relies on pure modularity, with a nook, again and flat backside part, which customers can mix into nearly infinite compositions.
On the time of its creation, it was an progressive thought to present folks the company to design their very own couch and residing house by a sequence of items that may very well be configured in codecs that greatest swimsuit their customers’ wants. Whereas the earlier fashions featured a extra streamlined cushion design, over time the couch advanced with seen seams and irregular edges, trying like a refined DIY composition and enhancing its mission. Added platforms and out of doors variations (in addition to adjustable backs) have expanded the design’s scope inside the residence.
Outlined by daring patterns which can be usually present in mix-and-match compositions and positively higher suited to massive areas, the place compositions can actually carry to life its creator’s authentic thought, it’s plain that the Mah Jong couch makes for an thrilling buying journey certainly.


