Designed by Carole Baijings and Stefan Scholten, the ColourForm Sofa Group was inspired by the creative tensions between colour and pattern, between surface and form, and between design and production that defines every project the designers undertakes. It is the perfect expression of its their artistic process. Scholten & Baijings is known for sculpting in pattern, texture, and colour. When designing furniture, the designers consider the play of light and shadow, and the geometry of forms that comfortably host a variety of human postures. Throughout their practice, the designers emphasize multiplicity and combination with their designs, and, in their ColourForm Sofa Group, the result is a vocabulary of multiple lounge seating pieces, including two- or three-seat sofas with or without arms, a club chair, ottoman, bench, sectional, and a distinctive tête-à-tête (an S-shaped piece that allows people to sit facing each other).
“We create options and possibilities because a product is produced and reproduced many times,” notes Scholten. “We want to give a feeling to each one that it could be unique.”
“And while we want to leave those choices and possibilities to the consumer in the end,” adds Baijings, “at the same time we like to show how it’s nice to combine certain elements or selections to demonstrate how it all can work together.” As intended, each piece of the ColourForm Sofa Group can stand alone or be combined with others to provide a place for work, play, or respite.
In addition to the ColourForm Sofa Group, Scholten & Baijings also collaborated with the Maharam Design Studio to create three new textiles: Mesh, Tracery, and Pare. Throughout their career as industrial designers, the designers have proven themselves to be acutely sensitive colourists—devising a hands-on, process-oriented methodology to arrive at unique hues and fresh palettes. The new textiles they created with Maharam are more intimate textile surfaces, representing a shift away from the boldness of their past collaborations.