The Monomorph Chair by Wouter Van Riet Paap is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2025 A' Design Award in Furniture Design Competition Category.
IronFurniture· 2025
The Monomorph Chair
Client: De Ontwerpdivisie
A' Design Award Winner in Furniture Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #163541The Design
About The Monomorph Chair
The Monomorph is a chair that is constructed with 39 identical wooden elements. Working with only one shape to create a chair results in a highly durable, modular product. These triangular shaped elements all come from one sheet of plywood. The 38 elements are connected by steel rods making creating the backrest, seat an legs. The chair can be transported as a flat package and is easy to assemble. The plywood is painted in preselected colors or can be used untreated in the raw edition.
The Recognition
About the A' Design Award
The Monomorph Chair is an Iron A' Design Award winner, a prestigious recognition granted to good designs that meet the professional and industrial requirements expected from well-designed creations. Iron winners demonstrate great skill, high specialization, expert understanding, and creative capacity of their creators. The Monomorph Chair is expected to be a highly regarded, admired, and cherished creation that is practical and innovative. This Iron A' Design Award-winning design integrates industry best practices and has competent technical characteristics linked with know-how and talent. The Monomorph Chair is respected for its thoroughness and is designed to provide quality of life improvements that help make the world a better place.
Where to Get It
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We create custom furniture that transforms spaces through sophisticated minimalism. Our architectural expertise ensures each piece maximizes functionality while maintaining clean aesthetics. From concept to completion, we design furniture that makes ingenious use of space.
Discuss Your ProjectInterviews
Grand Interview
Your innovative approach to creating The Monomorph Chair using 39 identical wooden elements represents a fascinating exploration of modularity - could you elaborate on how this concept of standardization aligns with your architectural background and vision for sustainable design?
As an architect, I’ve always been intrigued by systems and repetition — by how a single intelligent component can create complexity through variation in arrangement. In that sense, The Monomorph is an extension of architectural thinking into the realm of furniture. Standardization, when done thoughtfully, can lead to less waste, more efficient production, and surprisingly expressive outcomes. For me, sustainability isn’t just about materials — it’s also about designing smart, elegant systems that use fewer resources without compromising on aesthetics or quality.
The Monomorph Chair's unique construction method allows it to be transported as a flat package - how did this consideration for logistics and assembly influence your design decisions throughout the development process?
Flat-packing wasn’t just a bonus — it was part of the design brief I set for myself from the beginning. I wanted to create a sculptural, distinctive chair that could be shipped affordably and assembled with minimal tools. This challenge pushed me to explore how parts could interlock and support each other structurally, which ultimately became part of the chair’s visual language. The assembly method is intuitive and almost poetic — like building something from a kit, but with architectural precision.
What inspired you to pursue the challenging goal of creating The Monomorph Chair using a single repeating shape, and how did this constraint ultimately lead to discoveries about efficiency and waste reduction in furniture design?
The idea started as a kind of design provocation: could I make a functional and comfortable chair using only one shape? That self-imposed constraint turned out to be incredibly productive. It forced me to think carefully about angles, structural behavior, and how each part contributes to the whole. Using just one CNC-cut element made production more efficient and minimized offcuts. Ironically, the limitation unlocked a lot of creativity — it turned problem-solving into a design strategy.
Behind the Design
Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- The Monomorph is a chair that is constructed with 39 completely identical plywood elements. These elements are connected by steel rods. The plywood is painted in pre-selected colors but can also be used untreated in the RAW edition. The Monomorph is a relaxing fauteuil, intriguing from all angles.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- The chair has a total depth of 810mm, a total width of 650mm and a total height of 850mm. Materials used are painted plywood, stainless steel tubes with rifling inside and cap screw on the outside.
- Tags
- chair, fauteuil, plywood,steel, comfortable, modular
- Production Technology
- The 38 elements are CNC cut after various scale models were made. There has been substantial testing of various elements resulting in different chairs with different levels of comfort. eventually this single shape turned out to be the perfect single shape to create a chair with. There are several variants with 16 identical elements instead of 39, where the seat and backrest are formed with paper cord, used trucktarp or vegan leather.
- Design Challenge
- The hardest part was to actually find the single shape with which to realize an actual chair that is both beautiful and comfortable. After the shape was found the challange was to make the chair stable. For this several models were build and eventually the real life prototype. First with 16 identical elements with vegan leather used for seat and backrest. Later even more pure, using only that one wooden shape.
- Research
- As an architect I am always thinking about design and how to make it buildable. In construction the standardisation of elements, or even complete houses, has become more and more important. To keep costs acceptable, to minimize failure and maximize sustainability. But standardisation also limits the architects freedom to actually make a design. That is why I try to design these standardised elements myself in order to make the design leading and the standard elements following. The Monomorph is based on this principle of design lead standardisation. It is a chair constructed with 39 identical elements, which is a wooden triangle with rounded corners. A chair is formed by connecting these 39 elements with steel rods. The same element can be seat, backrest or leg. By adding more elements the chair can even be a sofa.
- Inspiration
- In nature, an organism existing out of one shape is called a monomorph. The Monomorph chair is the result of my research to find this ideal single shape to create a chair with: One form to define the result. It makes building the chair efficient, creating less waste.
- Project Duration
- The chair was designed in Januari 2024 in Utrecht, The Netherlands after several models were made. The first real size prototype was build in March 2024 after which extensive testing at the designers house took place. All in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
- Operation Flow
- The chair can be assembled by everyone who can handle a allen wrench.
- Patents
- Copyrights belong to Wouter van Riet Paap, 2024
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