Norya, China
Chinese manufacturer Norya embraced the Studio Makkink & Bey design for a sofa and started the production. This sofa has broken with the traditional arrangement of a living room, reshaping a room for life, where you are able to take a rest, gather with people, eat and dream.
Liberation of the living room
Unlike the other rooms, such as [bed] room, [bath] room, [working] room or even [dining] or [sitting] rooms, the living-room doesn’t suggest any specific form of daily activity. It does however invite us to celebrate the idea of life itself. A living room is in fact a room for life.
With their design, Studio Makkink & Bey aims to liberate living room furniture from its established role. “It’s a landscape changing and evolving according to its actors. It’s a living landscape, living furniture: living room”, Jurgen Bey explains. “Studio Makkink & Bey is interested in the landscape we live in and the landscape we make.”
Domesticating our daily life is about the context of these things. The design for this sofa is questioning how to domesticate our living room and how to domesticate our production landscape. By offering low and high seats, a sofa bed and tables in different sizes and heights one can organise the living room just like a landscape, changing it over time. Whatever your needs, you can configure the room with the various elements, and change it sustainably over and over again.
History
This sofa by Studio Makkink & Bey was part of the installation in 2016 for the Pavilion of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijng. Five international designers were asked to design furniture to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Redstar Macalline company. With the exhibition ‘Design for Chinese Lifestyle’ Redstar Macalline established a multi-cultural platform where Chinese consumers could engage with the ideas of international designers. Studio Makkink & Bey, Kenya Hara, Kengo Kuma, Luca Nichetto and Christina Strand were asked to design for the pavilion. High end Chinese furniture prodocer Norya was impressed by the design and after mutual agreement started production for the Chinese market.