HKS Partners with IOA and ROAM to Design Anya Chair for Health, Hospitality and Commercial Environments
Our team at HKS, IOA health care furniture company and ROAM hospitality interior design studio joined forces to create a new seating option, Anya, that is well-suited to variety of environments – from hospitals to hotels.
As a health care interior designer, I’ve long been inspired by hospitality furnishings. Cleanability is essential in health facilities, but the features that make health care furniture cleanable can make it look hard and uninviting. When the COVID-19 pandemic began to unfold, I saw people becoming more concerned about cleanliness in all sorts of environments, beyond health facilities. I wanted to build a team of designers with diverse expertise and set them loose to create a piece that combined the cleanability of health care furnishings and the softness of hospitality interiors.
I reached out to IOA President Fabio Delmestri to gather a team together – remotely – to design something that would work well and look inviting in almost any environment.
The Anya design team brought a range of experience to the project, to craft a piece that is cleanable, comfortable, durable and beautiful. Available as a single lounge chair or love seat, Anya has a curving armrest and an 18-inch seat depth with multi-density foam for comfort, as well as clean-out spaces for ease of maintenance, inset legs and a 500-pound weight capacity.
The interdisciplinary team of designers included Adam Gregory, Director of Design, IOA; Nicholas Tedder, Design Director of HKS’ Health Interiors practice; Zach Weihrich, Project Interior Designer, HKS Commercial Interiors; and Elena Oatman, Senior Designer, ROAM.
The Anya design team reunited online recently to talk about their design process and inspirations, and the value of creative collaboration.
What did your team’s multidisciplinary expertise contribute to the design of the Anya chair?
Nicholas Tedder, HKS Health Interiors: As a team, we all come from different backgrounds, and we’ve all encountered different facilities. But as interior designers, we all observe how people use space. We see how spaces are utilized or not utilized, and that influences our perspectives on, say, how a hotel lobby is inhabited verses how a health care waiting room is used, or a corporate lobby or an education facility. And we want to make things better through product design and interior design.
Elena Oatman, ROAM: A multidisciplinary approach allows us to see the same piece of furniture in different ways, for different environments and settings. In hospitality we always must think about aesthetics and comfort, not just the functionality of the piece, which is also very important.
What ideas inspired your design for Anya?
Zach Weihrich, HKS Commercial Interiors: There was a lot of emphasis on humanity, on compassion, on empathy. The big starting point was: how could this chair meet people? How could this chair take care of people? That was a little bit of a different way to approach the design, rather than as just an object or function.
Oatman: We wanted to create a chair with soft curves, inspired by the organic shapes found in nature and the comforting embrace of a cocoon.
Gregory: We definitely see that in health care in general, if you put a curve on something rather than just a square arm, people are more likely to think it’s going to be comfortable and gravitate toward it. So, the curves were important. And multiple seating postures – this chair is not just a sit-up-straight chair. You can sit sideways and put your foot up and lean into the arm. It’s inviting and user friendly.
Tedder: We wanted to design something that would fit as comfortably in a health care setting as it would in a hospitality setting or a corporate setting. That idea really started to influence the shaping and the scale and some of the forms we considered.
There were a lot of parameters that we put together that influenced what we shaped: how it’s cleaned, the cut outs that are needed for a health care setting (for cleanability) versus how the arms are shaped for durability and accessibility.
We also looked at the scale. We didn’t want to increase the footprint, but we want the chair to feel generous to people of different sizes. That played into the shape of the seat and the tilt of the back, and the design of the arms. We wanted to instill confidence, so that if someone looks at the chair, they know they’ll fit comfortably in it. That allowed us to beef up the legs and make them look really substantial and structural.
What was your collaborative design process like?
Tedder: We started out doing some internal visioning sessions around the idea of future needs. We also looked at what was happening in different markets, from fashion to furniture.
Weihrich: Those early brainstorming sessions were really neat because everybody was coming from different perspectives, but there were very clear through lines.
Gregory: We got everyone’s take on the direction we wanted to go, then we started on 3D digital models. Next, we narrowed it down to which sketch we liked and what scale we liked and started making samples. We probably made three or four full-on chairs. That’s where the pitch came in, and the leg size, just refining the overall shape.
Then we went into final mock-ups and prototypes. We started talking about the upholstery, stitch details, trying to figure out how to make the leg look like it was molded into the shape rather than just bolted on. I would take pictures of the physical model and hand sketch over the top so we could come up with the final lines.
Why are design partnerships important?
Weihrich: No one has the best ideas all the time. I always think about biodiversity – the healthiest ecosystems are the most diverse. There’s just so much benefit to everybody.
Gregory: As designers, we’ve all taken this path because we want to make things better. We want to make things easier and simpler and cleaner and more functional. When we all walk into a space, we each see different details and notice different things. That’s what we do – we see how people use things and figure out how to create new ones. Having so many eyes on this project was a big plus. Different approaches, different mindsets were really helpful. I think we meshed well as a team, and Anya turned out to be a great piece.