RDI designers Luke Pearson and Tom Lloyd take comfort seriously. Over their 28-year career, they’ve designed everything from award-winning office chairs to airline seats and hearing aids – where comfort and ergonomics are non-negotiable. So when they were tasked by furniture brand Cozmo with creating a high-back sofa that makes you feel held, their design process, they reveal, was as rigorous as it was tactile.
The finished sofa
The finished sofa
Launching today at London Design Festival 2025, the appropriately named ‘Hug’ sofa was created in collaboration with Cozmo founder Jacob Peres, who singled out Pearson Lloyd as the ultimate connoisseurs of comfort for the project.
‘Exploring high-back design was an obvious brief for us, even though it’s often overlooked in contemporary, design-led furniture,' explains Peres. 'Low, slim profiles are easier to achieve, with appealing proportions, but we wanted to take on the challenge. Pearson Lloyd were the perfect partners. They combine first-class design innovation, beauty, and style with a real depth of ergonomic knowledge.’
The making of the ‘Hug’ high-backed sofa
The new exhibition documents Pearson Lloyd’s research, design and development process for the ‘Hug’, complete with all of the early scale models as well as the full-size prototypes
The design began with modelling and prototypes rather than drawing
The process to create ‘Hug’ began not at the drawing board, but on the workshop floor, where at their first meeting, in July 2024, Luke Pearson and Tom Lloyd showed Peres a ‘Frankenstein-like’ wooden structure with moving parts. ‘Hand sketching often focuses on the search for aesthetic, material or constructional ideas,’ explains Tom Lloyd. ‘In this case, we started with the idea of comfort, which is a very physical thing. The use of foams and fabrics to create comfort and the exploration of posture and ergonomics is clearly challenging to explore or convey through drawing.
‘In a similar way to creating a beautiful coat, it is a form of tailoring that cannot be left to the end of the design process’
Tom Lloyd
‘We also wanted the look of the sofa to reflect the comfort that we were trying to establish, he continues. ‘So we let the design as much as possible reflect these early experiments. In a similar way to creating a beautiful coat, it is a form of tailoring that cannot be left to the end of the design process.’
Work in progress
As the design started to emerge, full-scale mock-ups gave the designers ‘immediate feedback’ on the ergonomics of the design. The secret to the sofa’s embrace-like feel, Lloyd explains, lies in its high back – ‘much higher than other contemporary upholstery’ – so that it cradles the back, neck and head.
Meanwhile, its exaggerated lumbar support is integrated within the back – a feature that 'shaped the entire design direction', according to Peres. 'We realised early on that comfort should be visible,' he remembers. 'The proportions, the posture of the sofa, the way it holds itself, even the way the textile wrinkles over feathers – all of that should communicate comfort before you even sit down.'
Work in progress
To achieve the perfect balance between support and softness, its frame is made of webbed steel packed with varying densities of foam, memory foam and a feather quilt. Unlike much traditional upholstery, which is stretched tight and stapled into place, the fabric treatment for 'Hug' is handled in a looser and freer way. ‘It feels more like a piece of clothing draped onto a body,' says Lloyd. 'This also makes it much easier for the customer to remove jackets for cleaning or replacement later.’
Testing a mock-up
During LDF, 'Hug' will be displayed at ‘Comfort Lab’, an exhibition at Shoreditch’s Wax Building that documents the designers' scrupulous research, design and development process, complete with all of the early scale models as well as the full-size prototypes. Alongside this, Cozmo has created a film that captures the process.
The showcase promises to give visitors a behind-the-scenes look at the amount of work and research that goes into making a sofa, and crucially, sample the results for themselves. 'For me, it proved that a focused brief and true creative exploration can achieve something remarkable,' concludes Peres. 'Comfort and design don’t just coexist – they inform each other. And that’s what makes this collaboration so exciting.'
Work in progress
Detail of the finished ‘Hug’
'Comfort Lab by Pearson Lloyd' and the launch of 'Hug' can be seen on the 2nd floor of WAX, 4 Garden Walk, London EC2A 3EQ during London Design Festival, 13 – 21 September 2025
mycozmo.com
pearsonlloyd.com
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