Milan Design Week – Take a seat on Peugeot Onyx sofa

PEUGEOT is on show at Milan Design Week. However, the company is not showcasing a new car. The main attraction is the worldwide premiere of the ONYX sofa, the first sculpted piece in a custom furniture collection.

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The Onyx sofa is a pure statement of PEUGEOT DESIGN LAB, the PEUGEOT Global Brand Design studio created in 2012 and open to external clients from all market sectors.

The Onyx concept

In 2012, PEUGEOT unveiled its ONYX trio, superbike supertrike and a supercar whose innovative bodywork is made of carbon fibre and copper, its pure cabin made of felt and Newspaper wood, the vehicle is powered by a 600 hp hybrid drive train. This supercar, which associates the latest technologies with natural raw materials, has found its static partner in the ONYX sofa, a 3- metre long seat made of carbon fibre and Volvic volcanic lava stone. In this product there’s no antagonism between progress and nature, between ultra technological materials and raw and natural materials. For Cathal Loughnane, 37 years old, the Head of PEUGEOT DESIGN LAB: “The ONYX sofa is an illustration of a new concept that we intend to explore: unique pieces of furniture, made to measure, to suit the choice, origin and personality of the customer, but which always respects a common idea: the union, via a pronounced clear cut, between hyper-technological materials – carbon fibre, glass fibre, aluminium – and raw and natural materials – rock, wood, stone.”

 

The values of car designers for non-automotive projects

“PEUGEOT DESIGN LAB is a design team inside Peugeot that work only on non-automotive products. We design everything except cars. All of our designers are car designers, they have worked or have been working with cars and had automotive training. I also was a car designer for ten years”, Cathal Loughnane explains to Hushslush. “There are two main elements that we gained from car designing and we can bring to other projetcs. The first is that car design is the most complicated and challenging design due to mass production. The second advantage is the notion of the brand. Car designers are trained from the first day in school to understand every brand before you design. You have to understand who they are, where they go, brand philosophy and personality.” For us innovation is a necessary ingredient. If the sofa wasn’t innovating, we would have stopped the project”, Cathal continues. “We don’t make standard products. We only create something that doesn’t exist. There’s no point in spending time and energy in something that already exist”.

Who is going to sit on the sofa?

“I don’t know if there will be one, ten or one hundred sofas, but they will be all different, because the rock will be different. I only designed half of the sofa, nature designed the other half”, Cathal says. “We will showcase the sofa at Paris Motorshow at the end of September. If we sell this first one at the end of Milan Design Week, we’ll make another one”. The price of the ONYX sofa has been set €135,000 for this version in carbon fibre/ Volvic volcanic rock. The prices for other creations will depend on the cost of the materials chosen by each client.

Seven sculptures, from 10 to 70 cm, accompany the ONYX sofa in Peugeot exhibitions. Lamps, shelves, armchairs, tables, etc…, designs that explore other alliances of materials, marrying obsidian with concrete, red ferrous jasper & steel, quartz crystal & aluminium, sculpted wood & 3D printing, black palm & basalt, marsh oak & Corian.

Peugeot Design Lab also presents for the first time in Italy the revolutionary piano for PLEYEL. A unique experience, with the presence of three pianists and a dynamic light show changing with the sound, it is dedicated to this object that challenged the codes of the music world. The body and soundboard of the piano are made of wood, the lid and leg are made of carbon fibre.