Duality plays the lead role in the new designs at HBF and HBF Textiles. Drawing inspiration from gender-neutral forms and a resimercial aesthetic, the modern furniture brand’s latest class of designers is blurring the lines of the contract market’s traditional models. Business of Home caught up with designers Henrik Schulz, Todd Bracher and Ghislaine Viñas at HBF and HBF Textiles’ Chicago showroom to learn about the visions behind their designs.
Bracher’s strategy for designing a great office chair began with simplifying the traditional, often masculine model. The result, the Vela Swivel chair, has a clean shape fitting for today’s gender-balanced workplace. “It can look like the executive male and it can look like the executive female, and I think a lot of it was by minimizing the components, simplifying the design and letting the textiles lead,” says Bracher, the Brooklyn-based founder of product and design advisory firm Todd Bracher Studio.
In an open-office setting, it can be challenging to find a private space to be productive. With his MOD sofa for HBF, Swedish designer Schulz hopes to offer a solution. The large-scale, outlet-enabled sofa can also act as a comfortable divider between a welcoming reception and productive workspace. “[The sofa] helps you create a personal space within the public space, or within the open space, which the office is today,” he says.
“For contract, this is where people spend so much time, so why not create spaces that feel uplifting and joyful and will make people interact in a positive way,” poses interior designer Viñas, who stood by the belief for her recently debuted fabric line for HBF Textiles. Inspired by a family of sea slugs, the Curious Crowd collection brings six playful patterns (think: large-scale polka dots and stripes) in equally playful hues to the contract market with performance fabric offerings in partnership with Sunbrella.
