Matthew Strong’s Carbon Fibre Sofa

WORDS Neo Maditla

Matthew Strong’s reimagining of an iconic design is a delight. His hand-woven carbon fibre sofa pays homage to the Eames fibreglass shell chair, which was introduced in 1950 and became the world’s first mass-produced plastic chair.

Charles and Ray Eames continued to experiment and developed several prototypes of a sofa in the same style, but the fibreglass shell proved too heavy so the sofa never went into production.

Matthew studied these prototypes, on display at the Henry Ford Museum, and created his own prototype, a lightweight, see-through sofa. In an interview with Architectural Digest, Matthew said weaving the carbon fibre filaments was an arduous job: “For the diagonal lifts, I had to weave each individual strand with tweezers – over and under, over and under.”

The result proves it was worth the effort. The industrial feel and beautifully tooled wooden legs give the sofa a modern look, whereas the silhouette is unmistakably ’50s.