Sheet metal has been a furniture material for decades, but it almost always gets hidden. It becomes the internal skeleton, the underframe, the bracket buried beneath upholstery or lacquer. The design conversation rarely starts with the metal. Deniz Özdemir’s Arc One, an A’ Design Award-winning lounge chair developed in Istanbul between October 2025 and February 2026, turns that convention completely around, making the sheet metal the entire visible statement and letting the leather cushions play second fiddle to the structural drama underneath them.
From the side profile, the Arc One reads as a single continuous gesture, one surface that sweeps from backrest plane through seat pan and curls forward into the base. No legs. No frame. No secondary structure of any kind. The bent metal does all of it simultaneously, and Özdemir arrived at that form using only laser cutting and CNC bending, two processes that leave no room for the kind of hand-finishing that usually disguises manufacturing decisions in premium furniture.
Designer: Deniz Özdemir
Most lounge chairs are assemblies, a frame joined to a seat shell joined to a base, each junction representing a production step, a potential failure point, and a logistics complication. Arc One eliminates all of that. The single-piece body requires no welding and no mechanical fastening, which means the bare frames stack flat for storage and transport, a logistical advantage that most furniture at this aesthetic level completely ignores. Özdemir’s research documentation notes that this directly reduces both production complexity and logistics volume, and looking at the photographs of the bare stacked frames, the practicality of that claim is immediately visible.
A round tufted back cushion and a square tufted seat cushion attach to the metal body via leather straps with snap fasteners, hardware that belongs more in a saddle shop than a furniture atelier. The strap details are visible and intentional, running horizontally across the metal surface with small riveted or snapped connections that read as honest joinery rather than disguised engineering. Remove the cushions entirely, and the bare metal frame is a genuinely severe object. Reattach them, and the warmth is immediate and complete, all without the metal structure yielding anything of its industrial character.
The cognac brown of the tufted leather against brushed raw metal is a pairing with serious mid-century pedigree, recalling the material confidence of Osvaldo Borsani’s work from the 1950s and 60s, where Italian designers routinely married industrial metal frames with generous upholstery without apologizing for either. The Arc One’s ottoman extends the family naturally, same bent-base logic scaled down, topped with a square tufted cushion that mirrors the seat in a different colorway.
At 650mm wide, 750mm deep, and 850mm tall, the proportions sit comfortably within lounge chair conventions without disappearing into them. The replaceable upholstery is the long-game move that most furniture at this price positioning forgets to make. Leather wears, tastes change, and a chair whose cushions can be swapped out for a different color or material is a chair with a genuinely extended lifespan. That decision transforms the Arc One from a sculptural object with a fixed personality into something closer to a platform.
