By Designer Sasha Lakic has always found it both interesting and creatively challenging to work with Roche Bobois. The branch of the renowned, innovative furniture design company’s UWS location is 2040 Broadway.
At first, Lakic said he was a bit baffled by the well-defined criteria that Roche Bobois used: evaluating a potential design on the basis of whether it was both visually and physically comfortable. “You had to feel invited to sit down and then find pleasure in actual comfort.” Lakic soon discovered this concept made sense and was in fact achievable.
Now, having partnered with Roche Bobois for about 20 years, he said it is a dream to work for this firm as they take risks and devote time and money to achieve perfection in their high-end furniture. Lakic has about 100 designs produced by Roche Bobois. Among the most enduring is The Bubble, originally designed in 2013; it’s been interpreted in multiple colors and seating options: a sofa, a stationary armchair and one that swivels, a footstool, and a double bed.
Inspired by nature, the concept for The Bubble was not bubbles but clouds bearing very many associations with comfort, ease, silence, and beauty. Lakic said that “of course” he lives with some of his own pieces. “in my house, I have one in green and in my apartment, one is purple, and the one covered in green mesh is surrounded by plants and really seems part of nature.”
How to achieve the level of supreme comfort in a Bubble sofa? Well, that difficult process took several years. “People don’t realize how much goes into making the Bubble. It’s not like a machine where you drop in coins, push a button, and then…” he said, laughing.
The long route began with pencil sketches on paper, then on to 2-D and 3-D computer-generated layouts and ten to at least a dozen full-sized models to assess and refine the design. “There are good surprises, and some things look weird.”
A big challenge was engineering just the right fabric that would have a three-way stretch capacity to cover the sofa’s module- bubble-like components. Lakic enthusiastically described the filling as “a secret Roche Bobois recipe” for the most comfortable foam available anywhere. The numerous components are held together by elastic binding within a wooden frame. The spheres installed deepest into the sofa are the softest with harder ones placed closer to the edges – all this is orchestrated to maximize the comfort of settling into the seating.
Initially, the Bubble furniture was produced in the 70s-style pop art colors of red, blue, green, and yellow. But the color scheme evolved to meet luxury customers’ requests for subtler hues and fabrics that were softer to the touch compared with the original, more techy mesh.
Thus, came to be the version that is enrobed in luscious white Italian Orsetto fabric –The Bubble: a cloud right in your living space.