The Monocle Book of Designers on Sofas places fifty of the world's leading architects and designers in their most private setting — at home or in the studio, on the sofa — to reveal the sensibilities, obsessions, and contradictions that shape their work.
About This Book
What does it mean to live with design? This book approaches that question with disarming directness, pairing an intimate photographic portrait of each subject — sometimes with family, pets, or telling possessions — with a probing interview that moves between the personal and the professional. The conversation always passes through the sofa itself: did they design it? If not, why that one, and by whom? But it extends well beyond furniture into life, practice, passion, and struggle. A special foldout catalogues one hundred architect-designed sofas across the past century, spanning Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Charlotte Perriand, Verner Panton, Cini Boeri, Zaha Hadid, and John Pawson — a compressed history of modern furniture design in a single spread.
Key Features
- 240 pages of photographic portraits and in-depth interviews across fifty subjects
- Edited by Virginia McLeod and Nic Monisse
- Special foldout featuring 100 architect-designed sofas including works by Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Charlotte Perriand, Verner Panton, Cini Boeri, Zaha Hadid, and John Pawson
- Published by Monocle, ISBN: 9780500966426
What You'll Discover
- How fifty leading architects and designers furnish and inhabit their own spaces — and what those choices reveal about their design philosophy
- The stories behind specific sofa selections: whether subjects designed their own, deferred to another designer, or made an entirely pragmatic choice
- A condensed survey of twentieth and twenty-first century furniture design through one hundred architect-designed sofas in a single foldout
- The gap — sometimes wide, sometimes narrow — between how designers present their work publicly and how they actually live privately
About the Author
[Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 240
- Dimensions: 242 x 189 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9780500966426
- Publisher: Monocle
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects, interior designers, and design enthusiasts drawn to the intersection of professional practice and private life — and anyone with a serious interest in the history of modern furniture design.