Sofa Design from the Inside Out | Schplendid Philosophy

At Schplendid we take a radically different approach to sofa design – by going back to first principles and building from the inside out…

When you think about it, there are two completely opposite ways to design a sofa.

One way is to start with a shape. A lovely outline….Something that looks terrific in a showroom window or on a glossy website. Once you’ve got the silhouette sorted, you then ask the factory to make it as cheaply as possible and fill it with whatever will hold that shape for long enough not to cause trouble until it inevitably heads off to the tip.

From the outside, it looks just like a real sofa. But on the inside… well, that’s another matter.

The other way is older. You start with the bones: with the timber, the joinery and the springs, and with the down-to-earth business of how people actually sit and how long they can sit there comfortably.

At Schplendid, we design from the heart of the sofa. And by “heart”, we mean the bit you never see…

How great sofas used to be made

If you look at classic sofas – the ones that have survived a couple of hundred years – you’ll notice they don’t feel ‘contrived’, as it were. There’s something natural, almost inevitable about their proportions.

That’s because they weren’t ‘styled’ into existence, but rather they emerged from good construction and materials, and from an understanding of the human body. People like to have an object on which they can happily slump, perch, lean, curl up, stretch out and so on.

And on the other side of things, timber can only span so far before it needs support. Proper eight-way hand-tied springs need a certain amount of depth to work properly. And lambswool and down need room to breathe and be their luxuriously comfy selves.

When you start with those realities, the shape sort of designs itself.

The running order is: comfort, then structure, then refinement.

And as if by magic, beauty turns up somewhere along the way, almost as a by-product.

Where it all went a bit wrong in the sofa industry

At some point, the industry flipped the order. Instead of structure shaping the sofa, the silhouette became the starting point. Once the outline was approved, the internal engineering became a cost exercise.

You can carve foam into almost any shape and create something that looks deep and generous without actually being deep and generous.

From a distance, it still looks like a sofa. But if you strip it back, there’s often very little going on inside. No real spring system or layered upholstery, just blocks of petrochemical foam doing an impression of something natural.

It works for a while, then it flattens, and ten years later, it’s in landfill.

How we do it at Schplendid

We go back to first principles.

Comfort above all else. Solid beech frames, properly joined. Eight-way hand-tied springs, tied in all directions so they work as a team. Layers of coconut husk instead of carved foam padding. Lambswool and cotton instead of plastic fibre. Down cushions that settle around you rather than bounce you off.

We build the architecture first and only once that’s right do we worry about the external line such as the curve of an arm or the height of the back.

And even then, those decisions are constrained by comfort: if a proportion doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t survive. It’s designing from the ‘inside out’.

Take the Knole… and the Vesper

Take the classic Knole sofa, dating from the 17th century...

Those high, squared sides weren’t some stylist showing off, they were to give you something solid to lean against and to cocoon you warmly in an enormous old draughty house. The depth was practical, not simply decorative, and allowed for real springing and real stuffing.

So the form came from use – and that idea still makes an awful lot of sense.

The Vesper is our version of the Knole. It has those high sides (actually slightly higher) and that cocooning quality. It’s the sort of sofa you can disappear into. And yes, it’s beautiful!

But the Vesper isn’t just a silhouette modelled on the Knole, it’s a properly built sofa that looks rather like it because it’s made the right way from good stuff.

It sits on a massive coil spring base: proper eight-way hand-tied springs, each tied to its eight neighbours so they work as a network. There’s no way a cheap zig-zag spring could produce that kind of give and bounce.

The big cocooning cushions are 80% goose down, 20% goose feather and the upholstery is layered with lambswool and coconut husk instead of plastic foam. Everything about it is built for comfort first.

(And of course because we’re not living in the 17th century, we do add modern things that make sense, like loose covers you can actually remove and wash, plus modular sections so you can build it round corners.)

So it’s an old, time-honoured principle updated for modern requirements.