Studio Stirling Elevates the Art of Hanging Around

Handmade in Heidelberg, Johannesburg, Studio Stirling’s sculptural hanging chairs translate African pattern into steel and leather for homes and hotels worldwide.

WORDS Neyani Mphephu PHOTOS Supplied

Founded in 2015 by designer Joanina Pastoll, Studio Stirling works in steel and leather, producing chairs that are as much sculpture as seating. Today, Joanina’s legacy is carried by Adelle Wapnick, her business partner of two decades.

Joanina and Adelle co-founded the award-winning design agency Cross Colours. After Joanina’s passing, Adelle took over Studio Stirling in 2024. Joanina’s contribution was the original designs; Adelle’s focus is on building the business, ensuring consistent production standards and growing the studio’s international reach.

“Joanina had the eye. She could see a chair in a basket or a pattern in a photograph that nobody else would notice. My part is making sure that her vision can travel and be realised: her designs in spaces all over the world, made exactly as she intended,” says Adelle.

Joanina came to furniture after a long career working with pattern and image. The shift was one of medium rather than sensibility: the same eye for geometry, rhythm and repetition found a new outlet in steel. Her mood boards drew on the woven geometry of African baskets and vessels, black-and-white body art, monochrome stripes, sculptural fashion and natural cellular forms such as bubbles and seed heads – references that move between the man-made and the natural. She translated these references into hanging chairs that read as line drawings: curves and patterns rendered in bent metal.

The Metal Collection comprises chairs built on curved, open frames. The Recliner rises in a crescent; the Nest Egg opens like a shell. Each frame carries a pattern: The Lined runs across the chair like thread; the Circle recalls microscopic cells; and the Twig is reminiscent of a tree in the wind. The open frames cast shadows that become part of the line art of each piece – a second pattern that shifts with the light.

Joanina later extended the same thinking to leather. The Sling Collection takes a quieter approach. Each sling is a single sweep of leather draped over a steel frame, shaping itself around the person sitting in it. Designed for indoor use, the slings bring warmth and texture to lobbies, entrance halls, living rooms, bedrooms and studies.

Adelle has chosen to keep all production in South Africa, where a team of craftspeople bend, weld, stitch and finish each chair by hand.

“Handmade is the true luxury now. Every chair we sell keeps skilled people working here, and that matters to me as much as the design does,” says Adelle.

The chairs work as single statement pieces, but they are often installed in groups. Clients hang rows of metal chairs along terraces and pool decks, or pairs of leather slings in living spaces. Wherever they end up, the effect is the same: a moment of stillness, a floating sensation and the quiet disbelief of sitting only a few centimetres above the ground. | studiostirling.com

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