In recent years, upholstery has become noticeably looser and more relaxed in its design. Instead of the once-dominant tightly fitted forms, furniture now often features ruffles, skirted edges, and softer, more fluid silhouettes.
At this year’s 3 Days of Design, Vitra presents its own take on this trend with “Bascule,” an easy chair designed by Berlin-based Studio Œ. The piece blends fashion-influenced upholstery with a concealed adjustable suspension system built into its structure.
The name, derived from the French word for “seesaw,” reflects the chair’s movement. “Bascule” has a spacious seat covered in a loosely tailored fabric that drapes over the frame like a garment. Hidden beneath this soft exterior is a mechanism engineered by Vitra that automatically responds to the user’s body weight, enabling the chair to shift smoothly from an upright position to a near-horizontal recline.
“Like a hybrid between a swing and a seesaw,” explain designers Lisa Ertel and Anne-Sophie Oberkrome, who used the chair’s new mechanism as the foundation for their design approach. Hidden inside the armrests, the system reacts to subtle changes in body weight, creating a soft rocking motion that accommodates a variety of sitting positions, no matter the user’s body size.
For the upholstery, Ertel and Oberkrome drew inspiration from tailoring methods in fashion—originally intended to allow ease of wear and greater freedom of movement—and reinterpreted them for the chair’s construction. During the development process, fabric was draped directly over working prototypes to study how it behaved as the chair shifted between reclining and upright positions. Different materials generated unique folds and surface textures, highlighting the chair’s evolving shape.
