Gold Furniture Design · 2025
Accordion Modular Sofa
by Yuqi Wang
- A' Design Award 2025 Gold Winner in Furniture Design
- Awarded April 15, 2025
- CLIENT: Jason Furniture (Hangzhou) Co.,Ltd.
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 216,008
- Verification code 30B8AA9EC7 · Verify this award
About Accordion Modular Sofa
Accordion is a modular sofa built from a single base module. The base module changes size and shape through compression, similar to the bellows of an accordion. Many sofa configurations can be created from one module to suit different spaces. The body is made of high resilience compressible foam, and the wooden side panels are joined by strong ropes and adjustable knobs. Turning the knobs tightens the ropes and compresses the sofa. The sofa can also be compressed for flat pack packaging, which lowers packaging, storage and transport costs.
Within the contemporary discourse surrounding adaptive domestic objects, Yuqi Wang's Accordion Modular Sofa emerges as a thoughtful meditation on flexibility, portability, and the evolving relationship between humans and their furnishings in an era of increasingly fluid living arrangements. The design appears to draw upon multiple traditions within furniture history, perhaps suggesting affinities with mid-century Scandinavian democratic design principles while simultaneously engaging with postmodern playfulness in its unexpected color palette and the whimsical inclusion of a carrying mechanism that transforms a traditionally static object into something approaching the portable. The technical achievement evident in the laminated wood frames demonstrates sophisticated understanding of material properties, the stadium-shaped profiles with their characteristic rounded terminals speaking to both ergonomic consideration and aesthetic refinement, while the layered construction visible at the edges suggests careful attention to structural integrity achieved through traditional woodworking techniques adapted to contemporary production methods. The chromatic choices merit particular attention, as the warm terracotta and camel palette departs from the cooler neutrals often associated with minimalist furniture design, instead embracing earth tones that evoke natural materials and suggest warmth in both thermal and emotional registers. The distinctive crimson circular fasteners function as both practical connection points and deliberate visual punctuation, their repetition across configurations establishing a systematic design language that unifies the various possible arrangements into a coherent family of forms. The undulating rhythm created by the segmented cushion arrangement introduces an organic quality that softens the geometric precision of the wooden frames, suggesting perhaps a dialogue between the controlled and the comfortable, the engineered and the yielding. One might consider how this design addresses contemporary questions about domestic permanence, the suspended configuration particularly inviting contemplation of furniture as potentially nomadic objects that might accompany their users through various living situations rather than anchoring them to fixed locations.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- This is a modular sofa. What sets it apart from most modular sofas is that it uses a single base module capable of changing size and shape to create endless sofa configurations. Additionally, it can be compressed for flat-pack packaging, making it easy to carry while also reducing packaging, storage, and transportation costs.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- The sofa dimensions are W890*D1150*H700mm.Since the main body of the sofa is made of high-resilience compressible foam, it is volume can be significantly reduced through mechanical compression during packaging. The flat dimensions of the sofa are W230*D1150*H700mm. It’s only 2/5 of the sofa.This reduction lowers the costs associated with packaging, warehousing, and logistics. It also can be easily placed in a shopping cart or carried on the back.
- Tags
- Modular sofa, Transformable sofa, Flat-packing, Portable sofa, Playful sofa, Tool-free assembly, Sofa for all spaces, Sofa for all spaces
- Production Technology
- The sofa is made of high-resilience compressible foam, and the wooden side panels on both sides are connected by durable climbing ropes and adjustable knobs. By rotating the knobs we can pull the internal ropes tight, the side panels can compress the sofa and achieve shape changes and size changes.
- Design Challenge
- The most challenging part of this project was designing a simple mechanism to adjust the sofa's shape. There are almost no sofas on the market that can change their form through compression, leaving us with no existing examples to reference. As a result, we researched compression structures across various fields and ultimately found inspiration for the sofa's compression mechanism in industrial machinery. We then created a simple prototype to verify its feasibility.
- Project Duration
- The project started in December 2024 in Hangzhou and it is scheduled to be completed by July 2025,and available for sale in October 2025.
- Operation Flow
- The three knobs on the side of the sofa are located at the top of the backrest, the bottom of the backrest, and the front of the seat cushion. Rotating the different knobs tightens the durable outdoor ropes inside the sofa at those positions, pulling the side wooden panels closer together. As the panels compress the sofa, different shapes are achieved. The knob design features clear and intuitive patterns, making it very easy to operate. Two sofas can be connected using the knobs and the wooden holes on the opposite side, much like Lego bricks.
- Research
- Our research is aimed at the furniture market, and we hope to get an innovative sofa product through our project. We Collected information through our e-commerce department, including user’s evaluation, Logistics distribution evaluation and other multi-angle information. We have identified several issues with many current sofa products, such as excessive specifications, difficulty in selection, large size, transportation challenges, and the inability to adapt to various spatial layouts. To address these market problems, we designed this sofa.
- Inspiration
- The design of the accordion sofa is inspired by the dynamic changes of the bellows during an accordion performance. This gave me an idea: if a sofa's base module could be compressed to change its shape, just like an accordion bellows, then this transformable module could be combined into endless sofa configurations. This would minimize the number of sofa specifications needed.
Colors of Accordion Modular Sofa
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