Silver Furniture Design · 2025
Life Cube Flat Package Sofa
by Hongwang Zhu
- A' Design Award 2025 Silver Winner in Furniture Design
- Awarded April 15, 2025
- CLIENT: Jason Furniture (Hangzhou) Co.,Ltd.
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 150,525
- Verification code 0E4464A9CA · Verify this award
About Life Cube Flat Package Sofa
This is a flat package sofa designed for easy assembly and disassembly. Its unique feature lies in transforming parts of the sofa is structure into its own packaging, significantly reducing the use of packaging materials. With detachable backrests and seat cushions, these components can be fully stored within the base, reducing the packaged volume to just 1/3 of the finished product. This innovation greatly lowers the overall costs associated with packaging, storage, and transportation.
Hongwang Zhu's Life Cube Flat Package Sofa emerges from contemporary furniture design traditions that privilege both aesthetic sophistication and pragmatic innovation, engaging with ongoing conversations about sustainable manufacturing, space-conscious living, and the democratization of quality design through intelligent engineering. The work demonstrates remarkable facility in resolving the perennial tension between visual appeal and functional necessity, its modular architecture suggesting adaptability to diverse spatial configurations while its distinctive chromatic personality, achieved through the bold complementary pairing of saturated blue upholstery against warm orange structural elements, announces an confident design voice that refuses to subordinate beauty to utility. Technical accomplishment manifests in the seamless integration of soft upholstered volumes with rigid architectural framing, the curved cushion segments appearing to embrace and flow around the geometric side panel in a manner suggesting careful consideration of both manufacturing processes and user experience. The mesh textile covering the seating surfaces introduces textural complexity that rewards close examination, its regular pattern creating optical interest while presumably offering practical benefits of breathability and durability. One observes thoughtful attention to edge conditions throughout, where the organic swell of cushioned forms meets the precise geometry of the orange frame with a confidence suggesting thorough prototyping and refinement. The flat-pack designation referenced in the work's title positions this piece within important contemporary discourse regarding sustainable logistics, accessible design, and the empowerment of users as participants in the final assembly and configuration of their domestic environments. The color selection, while bold, demonstrates sophisticated understanding of chromatic relationships, the warm orange preventing the dominant blue from reading as cold or clinical while establishing sufficient contrast to articulate the distinct functional zones of the piece. Viewers might contemplate how this design balances the competing demands of visual identity, comfort, practicality, and environmental responsibility, and how the modular concept invites personalization and reconfiguration over time.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- This is a flat package sofa designed for easy assembly and disassembly. Its unique feature lies in transforming parts of the sofa is structure into its own packaging, significantly reducing the use of packaging materials. With detachable backrests and seat cushions, these components can be fully stored within the base, reducing the packaged volume to just 1/3 of the finished product. This innovation greatly lowers the overall costs associated with packaging, storage, and transportation.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- The dimensions of the finished sofa are 1100mm 1030mm 700mm. After placing the soft components into the base, the dimensions are reduced to 1100mm 870mm 270mm, significantly minimizing the sofa's volume. This greatly reduces the overall costs of packaging, storage, and transportation.
- Tags
- Flat package, Detachable sofa, Assemble easily,assemble Rapidly,sustainable design
- Production Technology
- The sofa base is crafted from recyclable plastic using a one piece molding process, ensuring durability and environmentally friendly. The backrest securely interlocks with the base through a cruciform tenon joint, providing stability, while the cushion is fastened to the base via elastic straps, offering easy assembly and disassembly while maintaining comfort and safety.
- Design Challenge
- There are many flat package and detachable products on the market, but designs that integrate product and packaging functionality are relatively rare. The most challenging aspect lies in creating an innovative solution that can perfectly store the product, eliminate the need for complex assembly structures, and differ significantly from traditional frame style bases. To achieve this, we needed to conceptualize a base suitable for mass production that efficiently stores the product. After extensive research, we ultimately drew design inspiration from the technology of recyclable plastic one piece molding.
- Project Duration
- This project commenced in Hangzhou in November 2024 and is scheduled to conclude in March 2025, with an expected market launch in July 2025.
- Operation Flow
- The base features square holes for connecting the backrest and round holes for securing the elastic straps of the cushion. During assembly, the elastic straps on the cushion are fastened into the round holes, while the L shaped component at the bottom of the backrest is inserted into the square hole and pushed backward to lock into place.
- Research
- Our research is aimed at the furniture market, and we hope to get an innovative sofa product through our project. We Collected information through our research department, including user is evaluation, Logistics distribution evaluation and other information. Learned that many sofa products are now large in size, difficult to assemble, difficult to storage and other problems, so we designed this sofa to solve these problems.
- Inspiration
- Traditional sofa bases often use wooden frames, leaving internal space unused. During packaging and transportation, this space is not utilized and occupies extra volume, often requiring additional wooden frames for protection. To address this, I optimized the design by integrating part of the sofa into its packaging, allowing the base shell to serve a dual protective function. This maximizes space efficiency, reduces packaging steps, improves operational efficiency, and lowers costs.