KUMO by Anker Bak

(01/06/2024 China Debut)Anker sees storyline in every design he creates. The storyline for KUMO is "sitting comfortably, leaning back, looking into the clouds, and then thinking/dreaming about your ancestors". Hence he named it KUMO: meaning clouds in Japanese.The challenge we faced when developing KUMO was to show the reclining function esthetic and also sustain its beauty for long period of time. It took us many workshops with Anker in the process of achieving this goal and we even designed all 78 metal parts from the scratch. For the wooden part, we sliced 100-mm thick boards into 2-mm and 3.7-mm-thick slices, then formed them again before 3D machining so that it could keep the sturdiness for the weight and reclining stress, while keeping its beauty at the same time. Also it was difficult to make the reclining function very smooth, dealing with 2 different material: metal and wood.