Pearson Lloyd designs high-backed Hug sofa to "deliver the right posture"

Industrial design studio Pearson Lloyd and furnituremaker Cozmo have created Hug, a modular sofa conceived to mimic the feeling of a warm embrace, unveiled during London Design Festival.

The sofa is on display at the Comfort Lab exhibition at Cozmo's Shoreditch studio, which unpacks Pearson Lloyd's tactile design process that dived headfirst into model making.

"We made a choice to go straight into the workshop," explained studio co-founder Tom Lloyd.

"Often, you start with an idea in your head, and then you start to draw it and figure out how you might make it. But this was intentionally the reverse of that," he told Dezeen at the exhibition, which features the first handheld foam maquettes of the seating.

Hug is Pearson Lloyd's debut domestic sofa. It is made from a precision-welded steel frame with a strong but lightweight structure, which "folds like a camping bed" to enable flat-pack delivery that does not require any additional tools.

The furniture's comfort surface was created from layers of foam and feather-filled cushions, encased by Cozmo's trademark "jacket" covers that come in a range of textiles, which can be easily removed from the flat-pack frame and replaced.

"For us, the idea with this was to build something where the act of repairing and revitalising it at the end stage of its life was part of the product," explained studio co-founder Luke Pearson.

Hug was designed with an especially high back to maximise comfort, workshopped via a "Frankenstein-style" wooden scale model.

"The high back is very much about what it feels like when you slouch into it, put your neck into it, and snuggle into the corner," reflected Lloyd.

"We were trying to use this lumbar part as part of the design language," he continued.

"It wasn't so much about being a designer at that point. We were just trying to see how the foam might behave, and also deliver the right posture within the process."

Hug's enveloping back was created to be supportive enough to resist the need for extra comfort-enhancing scatter cushions, while Pearson Lloyd also worked with a local upholstery specialist on Hackney Road to ensure that every seam and fabric roll on the sofa was fit for the level of comfort required for a domestic sofa.

"We knew that the seaming and the treatment of the sewing would need to be very tactile," said Lloyd.

Considering the thinking behind Hug, studio co-founder Pearson recounted how working at The Conran Shop during his time as a student was especially telling of how personal sofa preferences can be, even when customers are seeking visually beautiful products.

"People would sit down on the sofas and within milliseconds, they'd just say, 'oh, I don't like this one'. I realised how incredibly subjective and important comfort was to people," he said.

"And actually, if you got it right, and the sofa was comfortable, it almost surpassed the aesthetics of it."

Founded in 1997, Pearson Lloyd was crowned designer of the year at the 2023 Dezeen Awards. At last year's London Design Festival, the studio presented its first Well Made exhibition of 60 examples of well-made design, before a second edition that was shown at Copenhagen's 3 Days of Design in June.

Cozmo was founded by Nadav Hassan and Jacob Perez in 2022, with the mantra "don't replace it, update it", when thinking about the furniture you own.

The photography is courtesy of Pearson Lloyd and Cozmo.

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