Wool lounge chair: Why I stopped chasing perfection to create something better

When people see the finished wool lounge chair, they often imagine years of carefully refined sketches, flawless prototypes and a perfectly structured design process.

The reality was very different.

I made one A4 sheet with rough sketches and almost immediately started building physical form studies. They were unfinished, messy and far from presentation models. They were never meant to impress anyone. They existed for one reason only: to discover shape, proportion, comfort and the behaviour of wool.

Looking back, I would not change that process for anything.

Designing a Wool Lounge Chair in Just Five Months

Within five months I designed and developed the first IDA wool lounge chair and presented it during Milan Design Week.

At the same time, I was building everything around it. The website. The photography. The renders. Conversations with suppliers. Meetings with organizations connected to Milan Design Week.

Looking back, it almost feels impossible that everything happened within such a short period of time.

But that deadline became one of the greatest advantages of the project.

There was simply no room to endlessly overthink every decision.

Why perfection can kill creativity

The moment I become too perfectionistic in the early stages of designing, something changes.

Curiosity disappears.

The process becomes heavy.

Instead of discovering, I start judging.

For me, creativity depends on movement. I need to learn by making. The moment I spend too much time perfecting sketches before an idea has physically proven itself, I lose the instinct that made the idea exciting in the first place.

Design, at least for me, is not about creating beautiful process images.

It is about discovering a form that eventually feels inevitable.

That is exactly why my form studies often look unfinished. During that phase I do not care about perfect craftsmanship.

I only study the essentials:

* Shape
* Proportions
* Comfort
* Material behaviour
* Tension
* Softness
* The way an object occupies space

Precision comes later.

Ideas need freedom first.

Why I chose wool

When I first decided to create a wool lounge chair, almost nothing existed.
There was no finished design.
No technical solution.
No proof that it would even work.
Only a strong intuition that wool contained possibilities that had barely been explored in furniture design.
That feeling became strong enough to set myself a clear goal.
Within five months, the chair had to be presented during Milan Design Week.
Everything changed after making that promise.
Instead of endlessly researching every possibility, I immediately started experimenting.
I drove to a Dutch sheep farmer to buy raw Dutch wool. Wool that still had to be washed and processed before it could even be tested inside furniture.
Within two weeks I forced myself to determine the overall direction of both the form and the construction.
For some designers that probably sounds reckless.
For me, it created clarity.

At that point, designing this wool lounge chair was more than starting a new project. It meant leaving behind the business I had built over the previous ten years. Walking away from something successful to pursue an uncertain idea was one of the hardest decisions I have ever made. I wrote more about that journey in my article about why I chose to leave a successful company behind to design the IDA chair.

Fast decisions create honest design

There are endless beautiful chairs that could be designed.
If you stay too long in the decision-making phase, fear slowly enters the process.
Instead of following intuition, you start searching for the “perfect” solution.
I believe fast decisions often come from curiosity rather than fear.
While the chair itself was still developing, I was already creating everything around it.
I contacted photographers. I searched for locations. I spoke with wool suppliers.
I contacted organizations connected to Milan Design Week.
I even commissioned renders before the chair was technically finished.
Not because I wanted to pretend the design already existed.
Because opportunities rarely wait for perfection.
Had I postponed everything until the chair was completely finished, I would probably have missed the opportunity to present it in Milan altogether.

Learning directly from the material

Very early in the process I started working with washed wool myself.
I wanted to understand the material without assumptions.
How much wool would a chair need?
Would it compress?
Would it recover?
Would it remain comfortable?
Could it actually replace conventional foam?
One simple observation kept returning to my mind.
People have slept on wool mattresses for centuries.
High-quality wool mattresses can last for decades when maintained properly.
If wool could support the human body so naturally in a mattress, why couldn’t it do the same inside a lounge chair?
That single question became the foundation of the entire project.

The discovery that changed everything

During my experiments, one characteristic fascinated me more than anything else. Tension.
Traditional mattress makers create support by compressing and tufting wool.
The moment wool is compressed, everything changes.
It becomes firmer. More supportive. More stable.

That observation eventually led to the core principle behind the IDA wool lounge chair.
Instead of relying on hidden foam or a rigid internal frame, the chair creates its shape through compression, folding and carefully controlled tension inside the wool itself.
That was the moment the concept finally became clear.
The material itself became the structure.
A Different Way of Designing a Wool Lounge Chair
People often romanticize slow design processes.
Sometimes that makes perfect sense.
Certain projects genuinely need years of development.
This project needed urgency.
Speed forced me to trust my instincts before overthinking could remove the energy that started everything.
That doesn’t mean this approach is always the right one.
But for this project it created exactly the focus I needed.
There was simply no time to doubt every small decision.
I also know something about myself.
I become bored surprisingly quickly.
I care deeply about details—probably more than people expect—but I don’t enjoy repeating the same process forever.
I loved developing the chair. I loved experimenting. I loved discovering. I loved solving technical problems.
But I also enjoy the fact that today the production is handled by specialists.
Because the part that excites me most is discovering what something can become before it fully exists.
Real Ideas Rarely Begin Beautifully
The design world often celebrates polished sketchbooks, flawless prototypes and perfectly curated process photography.
But many meaningful ideas begin somewhere very different.
They begin with raw materials.
With unfinished models. With uncertainty. With intuition.
My process certainly did not look impressive in the beginning.
But it resulted in a wool lounge chair that challenged conventional furniture construction by replacing foam and hidden frames with the natural properties of wool itself.

Sometimes the most valuable part of designing is not making something look finished.
It is allowing an idea enough freedom to become something completely unexpected.