Thanks to a plethora of portable devices and streaming services in the cloud, a lot of music listening today is done on the go, or while multitasking on something else. To bring some focused enjoyment back to music, smart speaker makers Sonos commissioned designer Soren Rose and his Copenhagen-based workshop KBH to craft a piece of furniture that would create an “immersive listening experience.”
The result? A low-slung lounge chair made of warm materials like smoked oak and velvet, with a rounded edges that take after Sonos’ latest release, a white edition of its SUB wireless subwoofer. There was, of course, more to the design than a literal allusion to the Sonos product.
In an accompanying promo video describing his process, KBH designer Kim Dolva says that listening to music is “one of the only time-outs” we still have. So he set out to design something that feels private and optimized for “just you time”—in this case, a chair that “surrounds you a bit, tucks you in a bit.” Somewhere you can settle in for hours at a time. (It also helps that, at least to us, all the wooden rods surrounding the seat call to mind the innards of an organ.)