Swing

The clients wanted a place to do nothing. Not a bench, not an outdoor sofa, but somewhere with the slight disobedience of a swing, without the cheapness the word usually implies.

“Not an ugly one” was the brief,
which turned out to be the harder problem.

The answer was to design it as a piece of furniture first, an A-frame second. Linen upholstery instead of weatherproof plastic, deep enough to sit in rather than perch on, a structure substantial enough to read as architecture rather than garden equipment.

The movement is slow and even, the kind that asks you to stay rather than rock. Sitting in it does exactly what the brief asked: it turns “sit outside” into somewhere you’d choose to be.