Designing a frameless lounge chair with dutch wool

I made one A4 sheet with rough sketches and then immediately moved on to physical form studies. Those studies were unfinished and messy. Not beautiful presentation models or carefully refined objects made to impress people. They were simply tools to discover form, proportion and comfort.

At that point, I had no idea those experiments would eventually become a frameless lounge chair.

And honestly, I did not feel ashamed of the unfinished models at all.

I was actually proud of them.

Because within five months I designed and developed the standard IDA chair and presented it during Milan Design Week. At the same time I built everything around it. The website, the renders, the photography and the conversations with suppliers and organizations in Milan. Looking back, it almost feels impossible that it all happened in such a short amount of time, but at that moment there was simply no space to endlessly overthink everything.

The moment I become too perfectionistic in the early stages of designing, I lose energy. Curiosity disappears and the process starts to feel heavy. I need movement while creating. I want to discover while making. As soon as I spend too much time perfecting sketches or models before the idea has physically proven itself, I lose connection with the instinct that created the excitement in the first place.

For me, designing is not about creating beautiful process images. It is about finding a form that feels inevitable.

That is why my form studies often look unfinished. Because in that phase, the finish does not matter to me. I only look at the shape, the tension inside the material, the proportions, the softness, the comfort and the feeling of the object in space.

The final object will naturally demand precision eventually. But ideas need freedom first.

When I first had the idea to work with wool, I had almost nothing. No finished design, no technical solution and no certainty that it would even work. I only had the feeling that something interesting was hidden inside the material.

Designing a frameless lounge chair started with a deadline

So I made a promise to myself. Within five months I would present the chair in Milan.

That deadline completely changed the way I worked.

Instead of endlessly researching or doubting every decision, I immediately started moving. I drove to a farmer to buy raw Dutch wool. Wool that still had to be washed and processed. Almost immediately after that, I started experimenting. I gave myself only two weeks to determine the direction of the form and the technical approach behind it.

For some designers that probably sounds reckless, but for me it worked perfectly.

There are endless beautiful forms possible. If you stay too long in the decision-making phase, fear slowly enters the process. You stop choosing intuitively and start trying to make the “right” decision. By choosing quickly, I think you often choose with your heart instead of with fear.

At the same time, I already started building the world around the chair while the chair itself did not fully exist yet. I called people for possible photoshoot locations, contacted wool suppliers and spoke with organizations connected to exhibitions in Milan. I even had renders made before the chair was technically fully developed.

Not because I wanted to fake the process, but because opportunities move quickly. If I had waited until everything was perfect, I would never have been able to apply for presentations during Milan Design Week.

That pressure actually helped me.

Quite early in the process I started working with washed wool myself because I wanted to experience the material one-to-one. I had no idea how wool would behave inside a chair. I did not know how much wool was needed, whether it would hold its shape or whether it would even be comfortable to sit in.

The thing that gave me confidence was actually very simple.

People have been sleeping on wool mattresses for centuries. Good wool mattresses can last an incredibly long time when maintained properly. I thought: if wool can support the body so beautifully in a mattress, why could it not work in a chair?

That idea became the starting point of the entire project.

What fascinated me most was the role tension plays in wool. Traditional mattress makers create tension by compressing and tufting the wool. Once wool is compressed, it changes completely. It becomes firmer, more supportive and much thinner. That observation stayed in my mind throughout the entire development process.

Why I chose a frameless lounge chair

Eventually it led to the central idea behind the IDA chair.

No hidden frame. No foam. Instead, the shape is created through compression, folding and tension within the wool itself. That decision became the foundation of the frameless lounge chair I wanted to create.

That was the moment the chair truly started to make sense to me.

People often romanticize slow design processes, and sometimes for good reason. Some projects need years. But this project needed urgency. The speed forced me to trust my instincts before overthinking could destroy the energy behind the idea.

That does not mean this way of working is always healthy or always correct. But for that specific period, it worked perfectly for me. The pressure of time created focus. There was simply no room to endlessly doubt every small detail.

I also know about myself that I get bored quickly. I care deeply about details, probably more than people expect, but I am not someone who enjoys endlessly repeating the same process over and over again. I loved developing the chair. I loved the experimentation, the discoveries and the technical challenges. But I also love that production is now handled by others.

Because for me, the real excitement lies in discovering what something can become before it fully exists.

There is a strange pressure within the design world to present creativity as something completely controlled. Beautiful sketchbooks, perfect prototypes and aesthetic process photography almost seem mandatory.

But many real ideas are born in chaos.

In raw materials, imperfect models and fast decisions. In intuition before certainty.

My process did not look impressive in the beginning.

But it resulted in something real: a frameless lounge chair built around wool instead of a traditional frame.

And honestly, I would do it exactly the same way again.