Pepê Lima’s Jacob armchair doesn’t ease itself into a room — it arrives. Designed for Indonesian furniture brand Blackwood, the chair took home three accolades at the 2025 European Product Design Award, including Top Design Winner in Home Furniture and the title of Best Furniture Design of 2025, and one look at the chair tells you why.
Jacob is built on a fundamental tension between softness and structure. The upholstery is rounded and generous, the kind of seat that pulls you in before you’ve even made up your mind to sit. Beneath it, a solid wood frame has been precisely machined into sweeping, embracing curves that mirror the body’s own geometry. There’s nothing arbitrary about the silhouette. Every radius feels considered, every transition from material to material deliberate.
Designer: Pepê Lima
The defining move, though, lives at the back. A cast-metal detail cuts across the wooden structure in a way that could have felt aggressive, but lands as something closer to punctuation. It draws your eye without demanding it. It gives the chair its identity, a flash of industrial honesty inside what would otherwise be a purely warm, organic object. It’s the kind of detail that rewards a second look, the mark of a designer who understands that restraint and boldness are not opposites.
Lima is no stranger to that balance. A graduate of Centro Universitário Belas Artes in São Paulo with more than fifteen years in the furniture trade, he sharpened his craft further at the Politecnico di Milano, where he worked with Studio Incontri on projects for Alessi and Samsung. That combination of Brazilian warmth and European precision shows up clearly in Jacob. The chair speaks both languages fluently.
Customization is central to how Jacob lives in the world. Leather or fabric upholstery, a range of wood tones, and various metal finishes mean the chair can read as a classic club seat or a sharp contemporary accent depending on the room it enters. It doesn’t compromise to fit in. It adapts without losing its character, which is a much harder thing to design.
What Jacob ultimately achieves is something the furniture world rarely pulls off cleanly: a sculptural piece without being unwelcoming, refined without being cold, and bold without being loud. It sits in a room the way a well-dressed person sits in a conversation, present and unhurried, with something worth saying.
