Tag Archives: chairs

ARBREST COVE Is the Office Chair That is Actually Designed for Women

Posted on by

Most office chairs start with a body that isn’t yours. The measurements, the pivot points, the lumbar curve, they’re all built around broad averages that do not always translate well to smaller frames, leaving some users to compensate with cushions, perching, and constant readjusting. Arbrest’s COVE chair flips that order, starting with female proportions as the baseline, then building fit, posture support, and a one-touch stretch around them.

ARBREST calls itself a smart lifestyle technology brand rather than a furniture company. COVE is ARBREST’s first product and made its global debut in Berlin on September 4, 2026, as a Best in Design winner at the IFA Innovation Awards 2026. The company doesn’t define itself by category, choosing instead to start from real human needs rather than a predetermined product type. COVE reflects that approach directly, treating the female body as the starting reference rather than a modification made after the fact, built around fit, motion, and recovery.

Designer: ARBREST

Instead of one universal seat size with a few knobs to twist, COVE calibrates seven points before you even settle in: seat height, seat width, seat depth, lumbar apex, armrest distance, headrest height, and footrest offset. On the pre-production model shown at IFA 2026, the seat height adjusts from 18.1 to 21.3 inches, while seat depth ranges from 16.9 to 19.3 inches, a useful context for understanding how COVE approaches fit for smaller frames. Final production dimensions and specifications may change before launch.

Once you’re seated, the cushion works in layers rather than as one flat pad. The area beneath your sit bones stays firm enough to keep you from sinking in after hours, while the pelvic region contours gently around your natural shape and the front edge softens under the thighs instead of digging in. Sitting cross-legged doesn’t throw off the balance, which is rare for a chair built around proper posture.

The small stuff is where COVE quietly stands out. Its winged headrest leaves room for a ponytail or a bun instead of squashing it flat during recline, the touch controls are wide enough to tap with long nails without fumbling, and the 5D dynamic armrests adjust along multiple axes to keep meeting your elbows, whether you’re typing, reading, or browsing.

When you lean into a task, COVE leans with you. A 16-degree forward tilt opens up the angle between the seat and backrest, easing pressure off your stomach and letting your weight settle naturally toward the footrest. It’s the kind of support that keeps you locked into typing or designing without ever needing to retreat back into the chair to feel supported, even during long stretches of focused work.

Behind you, 12 separate support units run along a flexible spine plate, each one reacting on its own to small shifts in your shoulders, back, and lower spine. Lean slightly to one side or twist to grab something off the desk, and the backrest adjusts locally instead of moving as one stiff panel, which keeps the fit close no matter how much you fidget.

COVE moves through four working angles altogether, tilting forward 16 degrees, sitting upright at 105 degrees, easing back to 120 degrees, and reclining fully at 135 degrees. Five points – the headrest, armrests, backrest, seat, and footrest – shift together through all of them, so changing position doesn’t mean fixing five separate parts individually every time you move. That coordination matters most in the middle of a long workday.

When fatigue creeps in, a single press sets off COVE’s stretch function. The motorized lumbar support pushes forward as the backrest reclines, slowly opening up your lower back, while the dual-tier footrest keeps your legs supported and carries that stretch down through your hips. None of it requires standing up, just a few seconds before getting back to work feeling looser.

What stands out most about COVE isn’t any single mechanism; it’s the order of operations. The fit comes first, the motion follows naturally, and the stretch exists for the quieter moments in between, all built around a body that was part of the original brief rather than an edit to it. ARBREST is showcasing COVE at IFA Berlin 2026 in Hall 2.2, Stand 141, through September 8.

Final production dimensions and specifications may change before launch.

The post ARBREST COVE Is the Office Chair That is Actually Designed for Women first appeared on Yanko Design.

An Industrial Designer Hid the Chair’s Entire Folding Mechanism Inside the Backrest

Posted on by

Gudmundur Ludvik had a question he couldn’t let go of. Why should a folding chair be a compromise? The answer, for decades, had been accepted without much pushback: folding chairs sacrifice comfort for storage, aesthetics for portability. The category had been quietly settled. Ludvik disagreed.

The Backflip, produced by HAY, is his rebuttal. An Icelandic designer based in Vejle, Denmark, Ludvik trained first as a carpenter and cabinetmaker before studying sculpture at the Icelandic Academy of Arts and furniture design at the Danish Design School, graduating in 2002. That layered background — craft, art, design — shows in the Backflip. The chair doesn’t announce its ingenuity. It keeps it entirely to itself.

Designer: Gudmundur Ludvik

The defining feature is a folding mechanism concealed within the backrest. A single rotation collapses the chair in one continuous motion; one hand is all it takes. There are no exposed hinges, no visible hardware, no visual record of the engineering beneath. The mechanism is part of the structure rather than an addition to it, and that distinction is everything. From the front, the Backflip looks like a chair that simply sits well. Which is the point.

Ludvik’s stated ambition was to approach the folding chair typology from the opposite direction: create a good chair first, and a folding chair second. The frame is solid beech wood, lacquered, with a moulded plywood backrest. The profile is clean and unhurried, shaped by the logic of material and construction rather than any impulse toward decoration. Available in natural beech across a range of coloured finishes, it translates across private dining rooms and public hospitality interiors without trying too hard in either direction.

HAY also offers a matching wall bracket, designed to hold one or two folded Backflip chairs flush against any wall. It’s a satisfying extension of the concept: a chair that folds becomes genuinely space-saving only when storage itself is resolved. The bracket completes that thought without making a fuss about it.

The Backflip was previewed at 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen in 2026, where it sat alongside work from Jasper Morrison and Philippe Malouin in HAY’s exhibition at O-Overgaden, a contemporary art institution in Christianshavn. In that company, it held its own, which is a fair measure of how resolved the design feels.

What Ludvik has made is not a clever folding chair. It’s a chair that happens to fold, and the difference is considerable. That the mechanism disappears entirely into the backrest is less a magic trick than a design argument, made quietly, about where the priorities should lie.

The post An Industrial Designer Hid the Chair’s Entire Folding Mechanism Inside the Backrest first appeared on Yanko Design.

Ex-McLaren Designers Just Built a $130,000 Carbon Fiber Chair

Posted on by

Luxury furniture has long borrowed the language of high-performance design without much of the substance behind it. Carbon fiber panels get applied as surface decoration, automotive references appear in product copy as shorthand for precision, and racing-inspired silhouettes turn up on lounge chairs. The materials may occasionally be genuine, but the engineering thinking behind them rarely makes the trip from one industry to the other.

Ennua’s Element 01 takes a different position. The people behind it didn’t simply borrow from the automotive world. They came from it directly, having spent years shaping supercars including the McLaren Speedtail, Elva, and W1. The Element 01 isn’t furniture dressed up in engineering language. It’s the result of applying actual supercar design methodology to a seating object, starting from materials and working outward.

Designers: João Dias and Patrick Carton

The first thing Element 01 does well is refuse to announce itself. Walk into a room with it, and it doesn’t immediately read as a chair, a sculpture, or a piece of furniture. That ambiguity is deliberate. The design prioritizes silhouette and proportion the way a supercar does, making the form something to encounter before it’s understood. It takes a second look before the seating function even registers.

The structure is built from carbon fiber, the same material used on high-performance cars for its exceptional strength-to-weight ratio. The carbon frame can reportedly withstand loads equivalent to around 2,000 kg, more structural assurance than any home seating has any practical need for. Layered over it are automotive-grade leathers chosen for texture and durability, and precision-machined metal components that bring a jeweler’s precision to every connection.

Several named configurations are available, each built around a specific combination of carbon finish, leather tone, and metallic accent. Options like Abyss, Aurora, and Ruler’s Solace suggest a naming sensibility closer to bespoke watchmaking than furniture retail. Each variant is treated as a distinct piece rather than a colorway, making the Element 01 more akin to a collector’s commission than an item that ships from a warehouse.

Ennua positions the Element 01 for private residences and architectural landmarks rather than conventional retail environments, which says something about its intended context. Sit in one, and it functions as a chair. Stand across the room, and it reads as something else entirely, a deliberate quality shared by the cars that influenced it. Most objects are content to be one thing, while this one insists on being at least two.

Element 01 is described as only the opening move for the brand, which already has the next five years of products planned, hinting at everything from audio equipment to fitness gear and a possible return to automotive design. The ambition is to never become known simply as a furniture brand. Every future object is expected to carry the same logic of function and sculptural presence as the chair.

The Element 01 is priced at around $130,000, placing it in the territory of bespoke timepieces and limited-edition automotive commissions rather than furniture purchases. It costs as much as a well-optioned sports car, and that comparison isn’t accidental. It’s built like one, designed with the same tools, and asks to be treated with the same regard that most people reserve for things with four wheels and not four legs.

The post Ex-McLaren Designers Just Built a $130,000 Carbon Fiber Chair first appeared on Yanko Design.

Ergonomic chairs rarely account for taller, broader users. LiberNovo built one, and it’s on discount for a week

Posted on by

Ergonomic chairs may finally be having their XL moment. For years, the category has obsessed over lumbar dials, mesh backs, and posture-perfect adjustability, while a basic fit issue kept slipping through the cracks. Taller and broader users still end up with headrests that fall short, seats that cut off thigh support, and backrests that narrow right where fuller shoulders and wider frames need them most. Fashion learned long ago that fit changes everything. Office seating has taken its time getting there.

LiberNovo’s Maxis brings that shift into focus with proportions aimed at bigger frames, including an ultra-deep seat, a broader backrest, a longer-range headrest, and a controlled recline system built for steadier support. With the first-launch offer now in its final 7 days, the Maxis arrives at exactly the moment when ergonomic design feels ready to stop treating larger bodies like an afterthought.

Designer: LiberNovo

Click Here to Buy Now: $809 $1299 ($490 off). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

LiberNovo’s thinking with the Maxis starts with a premise that should have been more common in this category much earlier: bigger bodies carry different ergonomic demands, and scaling up a standard chair does not address them. The seat runs 52cm deep, enough to deliver full thigh support and put an end to the floating-leg issue that taller users deal with on most office chairs. The back frame spans 430mm at the shoulder and 520mm at the waist, covering the kind of broader build that standard backrests tend to taper away from at precisely the wrong moment. The chair targets users between 5’10” and 6’7″ and up to 399 lbs, a range that has historically been left to sort through limited options in a category that treats average proportions as a universal fit.

A U-shaped headrest with 140mm of vertical travel and 120mm of horizontal adjustment tackles one of the more persistent frustrations for taller sitters: the headrest that lands somewhere around the neck rather than behind it. The adjustment range gives users with longer torsos the clearance to place support where it actually belongs. The Arc Armrests follow a curved path outward, keeping broader frames from feeling squeezed in and addressing the kind of side compression that builds quietly across a long session without ever quite announcing itself as the source of discomfort.

Six springs run through the recline mechanism, producing a progressive lean-back that holds its composure under bigger bodies. The gap between this and the standard recline on most office chairs is felt rather than measured. Under heavier loads, an underdeveloped recline either locks up too rigidly or releases too suddenly. The Maxis builds a more graduated response into the system, so the lean-back feels deliberate and controlled through the full range of motion.

Choosing between the Manual, Electric, and Airflow is the first real decision for anyone looking at the Maxis, and the differences between them are substantial enough to take seriously. The Manual keeps things mechanical and intentional, using a physical dial for lumbar adjustment. It suits users who prefer a set-and-go approach and have no interest in adding electronics to their seating. The Electric introduces motorized lumbar control alongside OmniStretch, a spinal decompression cycle built into the chair that guides the lumbar support through a stretch-and-release sequence designed to reduce the compression that accumulates during extended sitting. That is a genuinely useful feature for anyone logging serious desk hours. The Airflow takes everything the Electric offers and adds active seat ventilation through a centrifugal fan embedded in the cushion, managing heat and moisture for users who run warm or regularly sit through long, uninterrupted sessions.

The Maxis does the heavy lifting for bigger builds, but LiberNovo is rounding out the same launch window with two additions aimed at standard-size users who want something more specific from their seating. The Omni Pro brings motorized lumbar support, OmniStretch, and active seat ventilation to the existing Omni platform, making it the performance-oriented pick for users who want the full feature set without the larger Maxis frame. The Omni SE takes the opposite approach, pairing the same ergonomic architecture with a manual lumbar mechanism for a cleaner, simpler setup that rewards users who prefer comfort without a control panel. Both carry LiberNovo’s same core philosophy of support that responds to movement, just packaged around different priorities and price points.

Seven days is not much runway, so if you have made it this far, it is worth heading over to LiberNovo’s storefront. Each Maxis version comes with bundle options, including StepSync Footrest bundles, while the Electric and Airflow models also offer premium bundles with an extra battery. The current pricing brings the Maxis Manual down to $809 from $1,299, the Maxis Electric down to $1,049 from $1,799, and the Maxis Airflow down to $1,239 from $1,859. The Omni Pro and Omni SE are also discounted as part of the same first-launch window, starting at $909 and $569, respectively. The first-release offer closes on July 31st across the board, which makes this week the last real opportunity to get into any of these chairs at launch pricing.

Click Here to Buy Now: $809 $1299 ($490 off). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

The post Ergonomic chairs rarely account for taller, broader users. LiberNovo built one, and it’s on discount for a week first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Collapsible Stool That Actually Gets Stronger When You Sit On It

Posted on by

The flat-pack furniture concept is hardly new. IKEA built an empire on it. But Kinzo, a collapsible stool designed by students Jack Rathod, Pingla More, Kuldeepsingh Yadav, and Gayathri Rakesh, does something that flat-pack rarely bothers to do: it makes the transformation genuinely satisfying.

The mechanism is a single twist. Flat to upright, folded to functional, all in one motion. No tools, no assembly, no instruction booklet you’ll lose before you’ve finished reading it. The stool folds completely flat when you’re done and tucks away wherever you have a slim gap to spare. Carry it to a café, slide it under a bed, lean it against a wall in a studio apartment. For anyone working with limited space, that kind of portability is not a minor detail.

Designers: Jack Rathod, Pingla More, Kuldeepsingh Yadav, Gayathri Rakesh

The inspiration came from origami. The design team used paper as a stand-in for Craste board during early prototyping, testing different joint structures and fold geometries before settling on a basic origami fold as their core starting point. That methodical approach shows clearly in the final form. The geometry isn’t decorative, it’s structural. The central X-shaped form locks naturally under load, meaning the more weight placed on it, the more stable it becomes. Gravity does the work, which is exactly the kind of engineering thinking that separates a well-considered design from one that just looks interesting in photographs.

Brass hinges hold the panels together, chosen for both reliability and manufacturing compatibility. The cut-outs along the edges aren’t just visual breaks in the material. They align precisely to create a grip interface, making the stool comfortable and intuitive to carry. None of this was left to chance. The team built 1:5 scale paper models before moving to a full 1:1 prototype, stress-testing the joinery and geometry before committing to the final form. They’re the kind of details that show up when a design team has thought through the full lifecycle of an object, from the moment you pick it up to the moment you sit down.

The material deserves its own mention. Kinzo is made from Craste boards, engineered from agricultural residues and completely formaldehyde-free. That last part matters more than it might seem. Most manufactured wood products contain adhesives and binders that off-gas over time. Choosing a material that sidesteps that entirely isn’t just a sustainability talking point. It’s a considered decision about what kind of object you want in a space where people actually live and breathe.

The brief came from Agrikraft 2026, India’s National Furniture Design Competition hosted by Craste. Student competitions can sometimes feel like exercises in presentation over substance, but the constraint of designing around a specific, real-world material tends to produce sharper results. You can’t be vague when the board has a known weight, texture, and set of properties. The Kinzo team clearly used that constraint as a guide rather than a limitation.

Worth noting too is how context-agnostic the design is. A stool that works equally well in a bedroom corner, a café, and a lounge space without looking out of place in any of them is solving a harder problem than it appears. Most seating communicates a very specific setting. Kinzo doesn’t. Its warm, natural texture and clean geometric form read differently depending on where they land. That kind of quiet versatility is genuinely difficult to achieve.

Student work often gets praised with a kind of tempered enthusiasm: impressive for its level, promising for what might come next. Kinzo doesn’t need that qualifier. It’s a resolved piece of design that addresses real constraints with real intelligence, built from a material with a genuine reason to exist, using a mechanism that earns its elegance. The fact that it came out of a competition is almost beside the point.

Good seating is underrated. We spend enormous attention on the surfaces we look at and very little on the things we actually rest on. Kinzo is a reminder that a stool can carry a point of view. This one carries several.

The post The Collapsible Stool That Actually Gets Stronger When You Sit On It first appeared on Yanko Design.

LiberNovo Prime Day: 43% Off the Chair That Stretches Your Spine

Posted on by

The ergonomic chair market has grown into a fairly crowded space, with brands competing on lumbar support, adjustability ranges, and premium materials. For most people, the options are plentiful. What hasn’t changed much, though, is the underlying assumption that comfort is something you configure once and hold. Set the lumbar height, dial in the recline tension, and somehow maintain that position for the next eight hours.

LiberNovo builds its chairs around the belief that support should adapt to movement rather than resist it. The brand’s focus on long-term spinal health through dynamic ergonomics has earned recognition from prestigious publications and awards bodies. With the LiberNovo Prime Sale now underway, its lineup is available at some of the steepest discounts the brand has offered.

Designer: LiberNovo

Click Here to Buy Now. Hurry Prime Day Deals End Soon!

LiberNovo Omni Pro

The problem with static chairs becomes clearer when you look at how people actually sit. Research shows the average person shifts posture about 13 times per hour, totaling over 127 unconscious adjustments in a 9.8-hour workday. Conventional chairs treat every shift as a problem. The Omni treats them as input, with 60 precision joints and four synchronized mechanisms continuously responding to keep the back, neck, hips, and arms supported.

LiberNovo Maxis

The backrest is where this becomes most tangible. The Bionic FlexFit system uses eight flexible panels, 14 dual-link points, and 16 ball joints, letting the back support flex and contour rather than press back with a rigid frame. The ErgoPulse motor sculpts the lumbar curve to maintain spinal alignment as the user moves, so whether leaning back to think or shifting forward to focus, the support follows without manual input.

LiberNovo Omni

Two features push the Omni into less familiar ergonomic territory. OmniStretch is a five-minute motorized spinal decompression cycle built directly into the chair, guiding the backrest through a gentle stretch sequence to release tension and restore alignment mid-session. Active AirFlow Seat Ventilation draws cool air through a five-layer breathable seat structure using a quiet centrifugal fan, with built-in sensors that pause the airflow automatically whenever you leave the seat.

LiberNovo Omni SE

The standard Omni is the balanced choice, pairing electric lumbar control, OmniStretch, and the Dynamic Support System in one cohesive package. The Prime Sale includes flash deals on selected Omni bundles from June 18 to July 11, and the full campaign launches June 23. The US Premium Bundle, including the Omni chair, Footrest Stepsync, and battery, is priced at $829 against an MSRP of $1,449, a 43% discount. EU buyers get the steepest cut, with the bundle at €939 versus an MSRP of €1,826, a 49% savings.

Not everyone needs the full stack, though. The Omni SE is the most accessible, with manual lumbar support and the same core ergonomic architecture, but without OmniStretch or a built-in battery. The Omni Pro is the fully featured version, adding Active AirFlow Seat Ventilation, a high-grade aluminum alloy base, and Danish Gabriel Atlantic Fabric. The brand new Maxis Series rebuilds the platform for users between 5’10” and 6’7″. In the US, Super Early Bird pricing for these runs through July 31, with discounts of up to 44% off. The Omni SE starts from $569, with the Omni Pro starting at $909, and the Maxis from $809.

The sale adds a few extras worth noting. Qualifying purchases above regional thresholds are eligible for Lucky Spin Rewards, including a chance at a free chair or footrest. All purchases during the Prime Sale will earn triple rewards points for future orders. Additionally, Omni orders over $850 qualify for an exclusive complimentary gift bundle. It’s a straightforward set of incentives attached to a lineup that was already worth paying attention to before the discounts.

Click Here to Buy Now. Hurry Prime Day Deals End Soon!

The post LiberNovo Prime Day: 43% Off the Chair That Stretches Your Spine first appeared on Yanko Design.

A Folding Chair Designed to Stay Out, Not Hide Away

Posted on by

I have a complicated relationship with folding chairs. Not a hostile one, just complicated. They are one of those objects that exist in a permanent state of apology: useful when you need them, embarrassing when you don’t, and almost always the first thing you hide before company arrives. The folding chair has never quite managed to transcend its reputation as a placeholder for “real” furniture, and for decades, most designers haven’t really bothered trying. That’s what made the Kael Walnut Folding Chair by Esspur stop me mid-scroll.

It doesn’t announce itself as a folding chair. If you saw it sitting in someone’s dining room, you’d probably assume it was a permanent fixture, a considered purchase, a statement piece. The seat and curved backrest are solid walnut, warm in tone and shaped to suggest permanence rather than portability. The frame is polished stainless steel, slim and structured without feeling cold or industrial. Taken together, the chair reads more like something you’d find in a well-edited boutique hotel lobby than something you’d unfold for a dinner party and tuck back behind a door before your guests could notice. The proportions are right. The materials are at least photographically convincing. And the overall silhouette holds a kind of quiet confidence that most folding chairs never come close to.

Designer: Esspur

The design carries echoes of mid-century classics, and those references don’t feel like a stretch. There’s a rotational elegance to how the chair collapses that feels deliberate, almost theatrical, as if the whole point of the folding mechanism is to be watched. That’s not a common quality in budget-adjacent furniture. Most folding chairs fold in the most graceless way possible, a series of clicks and reversals that feel like you’re solving a problem rather than using a product. The Kael seems to understand that the fold is part of the design, not an afterthought.

Esspur is a brand with virtually no history and no disclosed location, and their online presence raises more questions than it answers. The product description calls the seat and backrest solid wood in one place, then references veneer craftsmanship in the fine print. I think that’s worth sitting with for a moment. We live in an era of very convincing product photography, and the gap between how something looks on a screen and how it feels in your hands has never been wider. The walnut might be veneer rather than solid. The steel might feel lighter than it looks. These are legitimate concerns, and if you’re the kind of person who expects heirloom-grade furniture, this probably isn’t it. Shopping from an unknown brand with no verifiable track record is always a calculated risk.

But here’s the thing I keep turning over: the idea itself is nearly flawless. Whatever the material quality ends up being, someone thought carefully about the problem of the folding chair and came up with a solution that doesn’t feel like a compromise. The design respects the object. It doesn’t try to disguise the fact that it folds; the mechanism is visible, structural, part of the aesthetic. But it also doesn’t apologize for it. That’s a harder line to walk than it looks.

For anyone living in a city apartment, a studio, or a home where space is a constant negotiation, the Kael makes a quiet argument: good design shouldn’t require a permanent footprint. The best extra chair is one you’d want to leave out even when you don’t need it. Most folding chairs fail that test spectacularly. This one, at least in concept, passes with something to spare.

Whether Esspur refines the build quality over time or quietly disappears from the internet, the design itself has already done something useful. It’s asked the right question: what if the folding chair wasn’t the awkward option, but the intentional one? It’s a question the furniture industry hasn’t had much urgency to answer. Maybe now it does.

The post A Folding Chair Designed to Stay Out, Not Hide Away first appeared on Yanko Design.

LiberNovo Maxis Gives Bigger Builds the Chair They Actually Deserve

Posted on by

The ergonomic chair market has grown considerably over the past decade, with brands competing on lumbar support, adjustability, and build quality. For most people, the options are plentiful. For taller and broader users, though, the experience often tells the same uncomfortable story: seats that run out before the knee, backrests that stop short of the shoulders, and headrests that hover just out of reach.

LiberNovo’s answer to that gap is the Maxis, a chair that doesn’t try to stretch an existing design to fit bigger frames. It’s been built from the ground up with larger bodies in mind, carrying the slogan “Built for Bigger Builds” with some conviction. Everything from the seat platform to the backrest geometry has been re-engineered around what someone between 5’10” and 6’7″ needs from a chair.

Designer: LiberNovo

Click Here to Preorder Now: $10 deposit unlocks $30 discount on balance payment. Hurry, deal ends on 16th June.

The most immediate difference is the seat itself. At 52cm deep, it supports the full length of the thigh rather than cutting off too soon. That might seem like a minor detail, but anyone who’s worked long hours on a seat that runs out before it should know exactly how quickly that discomfort compounds. The reinforced frame also supports up to 399lbs.

The fit story continues further up. The neck support covers a wider vertical and horizontal adjustment range, so it can actually reach where taller users need it rather than floating somewhere above. The armrests are custom-sized with more span and travel than standard chairs allow. Their slightly curved shape also helps prevent the waist compression that straight-edged rests tend to cause for bigger frames.

This becomes more concrete in the upper half of the chair. LiberNovo says the Maxis back frame expands to a 430 mm shoulder span and a 520 mm waist width, giving bigger builds fuller contact instead of leaving pressure concentrated in narrower zones. The headrest is just as deliberate, with 140 mm of vertical travel and 120 mm of horizontal adjustment, plus a U-shaped design intended to support the neck more naturally.

What keeps the Maxis from feeling like a bigger version of an ordinary chair is how the backrest actually behaves. The Bionic FlexFit Backrest is designed to move with the body as posture shifts, rather than holding rigidly to one position. That’s the core idea behind LiberNovo’s Dynamic Support System, which maintains alignment through movement without needing constant manual readjustment.

The recline system follows a similar logic. The Maxis locks into five preset positions, from 105 degrees for focused, upright work up to 160 degrees for near-flat recovery. The stops in between cover the varied moments a long day actually involves: a video call, a longer solo session, a quick pause. Having distinct positions makes switching between them quick and intentional rather than endlessly fiddling with them.

The Maxis comes in three versions built on the same reinforced frame. The Manual keeps things simple with a physical dial for lumbar adjustment. The Electric adds motorized lumbar control alongside OmniStretch, a stretch-and-release cycle designed to relieve spinal compression after prolonged sitting. The Airflow builds on that with active seat ventilation, using a centrifugal fan embedded in the cushion to keep things cool and dry.

LiberNovo Omni Pro

OmniStretch and the Airflow ventilation both address the fatigue that builds gradually over long sessions. OmniStretch extends the lumbar support upward and gently releases it, creating a stretch-and-release motion intended to help relieve compression from prolonged seating. The ventilation system addresses heat accumulation in the seat cushion, helping the chair stay more comfortable through longer sessions. Both features treat comfort as something that has to hold up across a full day.

The Maxis launches alongside two new additions to the broader LiberNovo lineup. The Omni Pro brings motorized lumbar support, OmniStretch, and active seat ventilation to the standard-size Omni platform, making it the performance-oriented choice for users who don’t need the larger Maxis frame. The Omni SE takes a more stripped-back approach, pairing the same ergonomic architecture with a manual lumbar mechanism for a simpler, set-and-forget setup.

LiberNovo OmniStretch

LiberNovo opened the Maxis pre-order period in the US on May 12 at 7:00 PM PDT, with the official launch set for June 16 at 9:00 AM PDT and the first release window running through July 31 at 9:00 AM PDT. During that pre-sale stretch, orders qualify for super early bird pricing, with discounts reaching up to 44% in the US. A $10 deposit also unlocks a $30 discount on orders of $1,000 or more, along with a free 1-year extended frame warranty and access to a three-tier premium gift package for qualifying purchases.

What the LiberNovo Maxis gets right is treating a larger body as the actual design brief, rather than an afterthought dealt with by scaling up existing dimensions. Every adjustment range, support angle, and contact point has been calibrated around that focus. For taller and broader professionals who’ve spent years on chairs that never quite fit, that’s a meaningfully different sitting experience.

Click Here to Preorder Now: $10 deposit unlocks $30 discount on balance payment. Hurry, deal ends on 16th June.

The post LiberNovo Maxis Gives Bigger Builds the Chair They Actually Deserve first appeared on Yanko Design.

Herman Miller’s Aeron Just Broke Its Decades-Long Neutrals-Only Rule

Posted on by

Office chairs have largely operated on a color vocabulary of one. Black. Occasionally dark gray. The reasoning is defensible enough: a chair meant to work in any office, boardroom, or home studio needs to disappear into the background, and neutrals are the safest way to guarantee that. The Aeron has lived by that rule since its 2016 remaster, offering four restrained options that leaned charcoal and graphite and asked very little of the rooms they occupied.

Herman Miller is breaking from that constraint in 2026, though only just. The two new Aeron colors, Jasper and Nightfall, aren’t a departure toward the bold or the playful. Jasper is an earthy olive green calibrated to read almost as a neutral while gesturing toward the biophilic design sensibility that has been moving through workplace interiors for several years. Nightfall is a sophisticated midnight blue already present across the MillerKnoll portfolio, added partly to make specifying a cohesive space easier.

Designer: Herman Miller

The full palette now sits at six hues, Onyx, Graphite, Carbon, Mineral, Jasper, and Nightfall, all drawn from natural references and all quietly confident about their ability to belong without demanding attention. For designers specifying a lounge, a studio, or a home office with a more considered material palette, those two additions open the door to pairings that the existing neutrals couldn’t quite reach. The chair’s structure and ergonomics stay entirely intact.

But the more substantive changes in this update aren’t visible from across the room. The team mapped where the chair carried the most weight and substituted in lighter materials, including post-industrial recycled content and bio-based nylons, with the result that the chair’s global average embodied carbon drops by 12% compared to the previous version.

That 12% follows years of prior reductions. In 2021, the Aeron became the first Herman Miller chair to incorporate ocean-bound plastic. As of June 2026, the company has diverted more than 660 metric tons of that material since its last tally in 2023, the equivalent of roughly 79 million plastic water bottles. Today, the Aeron is composed of more than 50% recycled content and is up to 91% recyclable, carrying both BIFMA Level 3 and Indoor Advantage Gold certifications.

Size inclusivity received a quiet update as well. The Aeron has always come in three sizes, A, B, and C, covering nearly the full range of human body types. Recent testing confirmed that the largest size, C, now meets all structural requirements to support users up to 400 lb, a formal expansion of what the existing design had been capable of without being officially stated.

The new Aeron is debuting at Fulton Market Design Days in Chicago, June 8 through 10, as part of an exhibition called “Living with Change.” It’s available now through hermanmiller.com, Herman Miller showrooms, and MillerKnoll dealers, starting at around $1,520 in base configurations and $2,050 for fully specified versions. The new colors arrive on a chair that already sells one unit every 17 seconds, which says most of what needs to be said about whether the core design needed changing.

The post Herman Miller’s Aeron Just Broke Its Decades-Long Neutrals-Only Rule first appeared on Yanko Design.

How One Loop of Bent Wood Became a Complete Chair

Posted on by

Every so often, a piece of furniture stops you the way a good sentence does. You read it once, then go back and read it again just to understand how it works. The Sori Chair by Portugal’s Teixeira Design Studio is exactly that kind of piece. It started, as the best ideas often do, from a daily ritual of sketching. Not a brief, not a client request, just the quiet, intuitive kind of drawing you do before the day gets loud. And somewhere in that process, a loop took shape that became something worth talking about.

What came out of that ritual is a chair that feels completely resolved. A single, continuous ribbon of bent wood loops upward from the seat to form the double-ply backrest, open at the center like a hollow frame, and the contrast it creates against the chair’s firmly geometric base is fully intentional. Below that fluid loop, the structure is all right angles and clean planes, held together by a cross-shaped base that looks as if it was drawn with a ruler and a very steady hand. That tension between the organic and the architectural is where the Sori Chair lives, and it’s a genuinely compelling place to be.

Designer: Teixeira Design Studio

The technical side of this piece deserves more attention than it usually gets in design coverage. That backrest loop doesn’t just sit on top of the seat. It rises through it, emerging from a precise cutout with the kind of considered joinery that takes real craft to execute. The layered plywood edges are fully exposed throughout, and rather than hiding them, the design leans into them. You can see the pale strata of wood at every bend, every curve, every corner. It reads as an honest material and an honest process, and that matters more now than it perhaps ever has. In an era where furniture is increasingly flat-packed and finish-wrapped, a chair that shows you exactly how it was made feels almost countercultural.

The name is worth pausing on. Sori is a Japanese word for the natural curvature or warp of wood, the subtle bow that timber develops over time or when shaped under heat and pressure. Whether the studio intended that specific reference or landed on it instinctively, naming the chair after that particular quality of the material says something about how this work is approached: not as a battle against the material’s limits, but as a genuine conversation with them.

Teixeira Design Studio, based in Viana do Castelo in northern Portugal, has built a portfolio that consistently returns to this idea of using plywood and bent wood to find new formal possibilities. Earlier pieces like the Void Chair explored how a single sheet of plywood could fold into a form that contained seating and hidden storage simultaneously. With Sori, the focus narrows considerably. No secondary function, no added utility. Just the pursuit of one fluid, structural gesture, executed as cleanly as it possibly can be.

That restraint is what gives the chair its real weight. Designers who know how to do more but choose to do less are often the most interesting ones to follow, and Sori feels like a quiet, confident declaration of that philosophy. Every angle you approach it from reveals something new. From the front, it reads almost architectural, like a small building with an open courtyard. From the side, the loop of the backrest curls inward like a wave at the moment before it breaks. From above, the cutout in the seat and the twin arcs of the backrest create a composition that could hold its own as a flat drawing.

Good design holds up under scrutiny. It doesn’t just photograph well and vanish once you look too closely. The Sori Chair gets richer the longer you sit with it, and that, more than anything else, is the standard worth measuring any piece of furniture against.

The post How One Loop of Bent Wood Became a Complete Chair first appeared on Yanko Design.