Terrazza Sofa: Ubald Klug’s Leather Landscape

Most sofas have a front. The Terrazza has a summit.

Ubald Klug’s DS-1025, designed for the Swiss leather house de Sede in 1973, abandons almost everything the word sofa usually implies. There is no back, no arms, no seat in the singular. Instead, broad leather platforms step upward and backward like terraced fields cut into a hillside, each level wide enough to hold a person, a book, a sleeping dog or a conversation. You do not sit on a Terrazza so much as settle somewhere on its slopes, and different guests choose different altitudes. Klug was a Swiss designer who spent much of his career in Paris, a student of the great interior architect who shaped him toward thinking in space rather than in objects, and the Terrazza is spatial thinking in its purest upholstered form. He called the family of pieces landscapes, and he meant it literally: pushed together in multiples, the units form ranges, valleys and plateaus that can fill a room the way geography fills a map.

Furniture as topography

The Terrazza belongs to the early 1970s the way a fossil belongs to its stratum. Across Europe the sofa was collapsing as a formal object: France had dropped it to the floor with the Togo, Italy had shattered it into movable blocks with the Camaleonda, and the conversation pit was treating whole floors as seating. Klug’s contribution to the revolution was the most sculptural of all: he kept the sofa off the floor but turned it into terrain, so the radical lounging of the era acquired a Swiss discipline, layered, ordered, immaculately stitched. And it had to be stitched immaculately, because de Sede’s entire identity is leather craft of the saddlery grade. Each step of the Terrazza is a clean, taut ledge of hide, and the piece’s drama depends on those horizontal lines staying knife-straight while bodies clamber over them for decades. It is a landscape, but a Swiss one: even the mountains are punctual.

“You do not sit on a Terrazza so much as settle somewhere on its slopes.”

How to see it

Look first at the shadows. The Terrazza’s beauty is in the deep horizontal shadow each ledge throws on the one below, a striped chiaroscuro that changes with every lamp in the room; flatten those steps even slightly and the drama dies. Then look at the edge profile: each terrace ends in a firm rolled lip, which is what separates architecture from mattress. Finally, watch people use it, because the object choreographs. One person lies full length on the lowest step, another sits upright on the second with feet on the first, a third perches on the summit. It is the only sofa in this archive that seats a group at three different heights, which changes the geometry of conversation itself.

The honest knock

The knocks are real. The Terrazza is heavy in every sense, a monolith of leather and foam that dominates rooms and removal vans equally. It offers no back support in the conventional sense, and guests who want a proper armchair posture will drift off its slopes toward something with a spine. Full-grain leather across that much stepped surface area makes it seriously expensive, and the low ledges collect sitting dust like actual terraces collect rain. It is also, frankly, a piece that demands an audience; in a small quiet room it can feel like a stage with no play scheduled.

Copies, and the tell

Imitations fail at the geology. In an authentic DS-1025 each terrace is a firm, distinct stratum with a crisp rolled edge, and the steps hold their line under weight; copies soften the internal build, so ledges slump into one another and the terraced profile melts into a lumpy wedge within a year. Stitch-work betrays them too: de Sede’s long straight seams stay parallel across metres of hide, a saddlery discipline that costs real money, while knock-off seams wander and pucker at the corners where the terraces turn. The original is landscape architecture in leather. The copy is a staircase wearing a tracksuit. Half a century on, Klug’s strange question still has no better answer. Most furniture sits in the room. The Terrazza is the room, contour lines and all, and everyone who enters instinctively picks their altitude.

A Loom & Hide design-archive story. We write about these pieces for the love of the ideas; we do not make replicas or copies of protected original designs.