Bronze Furniture Design · 2025
Akhalteke Lounge Chair
- A' Design Award 2025 Bronze Winner in Furniture Design
- Awarded April 15, 2025
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 11,942
- Verification code 5BAA473699 · Verify this award
About Akhalteke Lounge Chair
Akhalteke offers a unique sitting experience, evoking the sensation of riding a horse for the first time. Inspired by the designer's childhood horseback riding experiences and fascination with equine anatomy, the design establishes a two way interaction between the user and their experience. Drawing from the saddle, one of humanity's earliest seating forms, Akhalteke blends the comfort of a lounge chair with the essence of riding. The name comes from the Akhalteke, a breed of Turkmen horses, reflecting the design’s inspiration and dynamic form.
Amin Mohammadyari's Akhalteke Lounge Chair emerges from design traditions that celebrate material expressiveness and sculptural boldness, engaging a lineage extending from mid-century organic modernism through contemporary biomorphic experimentation where furniture transcends utilitarian function to inhabit the realm of collectible sculptural objects. The work demonstrates sophisticated understanding of compound surface geometry, achieving seamless formal flow through what appears to be advanced composite molding or precision subtractive manufacturing, techniques that enable previously impossible continuous curvatures without visible joinery or structural compromise. Each sweeping cantilever and bulging volume resolves with absolute material consistency, the flawless glossy black finish serving not merely as decorative coating but as integral formal element that amplifies every subtle surface inflection through specular reflection and graduated shadow, transforming ambient light into active compositional participant. The chair's evident structural logic, despite organic appearance, suggests rigorous engineering analysis ensuring stability and load-bearing capacity within forms that appear to defy gravitational expectation, a characteristic achievement of contemporary design wherein digital modeling and simulation enable formerly intuitive sculptural gestures to meet stringent functional requirements. Thematically, the work explores tensions between natural and artificial, organic and engineered, fluid and fixed, inviting contemplation of how advanced manufacturing technologies expand formal vocabularies available to designers while raising questions about materiality, permanence, and the cultural meanings embedded in surface finish choices. The selection of glossy black as exclusive chromatic expression carries rich associative weight, simultaneously evoking luxury automotive finish, high-tech aerospace materials, and art world minimalist traditions, positioning the chair at intersections of industrial design, sculptural practice, and lifestyle aspiration. The work's formal language suggests possible inspiration from equestrian anatomy, aerodynamic forms, or abstract natural phenomena like wind-sculpted geology, though any such references remain elegantly abstracted rather than literally depicted, maintaining sophisticated ambiguity that invites multiple interpretive frameworks. One might observe how the chair negotiates visibility and dissolution, its mirror surfaces simultaneously asserting material presence through reflected light while dematerializing through absorbed darkness, creating perceptual instability that rewards extended looking and encourages viewers to consider how we apprehend three-dimensional form through light's interaction with surface qualities.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- In the design of Akhal-Teke, my goal was to create a unique sitting experience, one that evokes the feeling we all had the first time we rode a horse. Akhal-Teke establishes a two-way interaction with the user and their experience, offering a distinctive way of sitting that the user willingly embraces.
This eagerness to experience and accept is inspired by the Form of Akhal-Teke. - Dimensions & Packaging
- Width 770mm x Depth 855mm x Height 720mm.
- Tags
- Conceptual, Lounge Chair, Lounge, Chair, Horse, Saddle
- Production Technology
- For the construction of Akhal-Teke, bio-composites made from hemp or flax fibers and PLA bio-resin were considered. This combination enabled the creation of a high-quality final form with desirable finishes while offering a sustainable alternative to traditional composites like fiberglass and carbon fiber.
At the same time, these materials not only promote environmental responsibility but also reinforce a natural connection to their inspiration. - Design Challenge
- The primary challenge in the design process was to create a two-way experience in the act of sitting, such that the object (seat) and the subject (user) engage in a dialectical interaction with one another, transforming sitting from a passive state into an active one and allowing for a fresh understanding of the sitting experience.
The next significant challenge was to achieve a form that simultaneously incorporates both aesthetics and functionality. The design was not intended to directly reference the anatomy of a horse. Rather, the goal was to establish a subtle connection to the experience of sitting, enabling users to intuitively connect with it without relying on direct or obvious visual cues. - Project Duration
- the project started in September 2023 in Tehran and finished in September 2024.
- Operation Flow
- The Akhal-Teke is inspired by the elegance of the anatomy of the Akhal-Teke breed of Turkmen horses, striving to go beyond its purely functional concept and becoming an object with identity in space, much like a noble horse.
As a chair, Akhal-Teke offers a unique sitting experience, evoking the feeling of riding a horse for the first time. Its form creates a two-way interaction with the user, encouraging a distinctive way of sitting that is eagerly embraced.
This eagerness stems from the form of the Akhal-Teke. - Research
- The horse, one of the first domesticated animals by humans, has a deep-rooted history with mankind. Our ancestors spent a significant amount of time riding, and thus, the way of sitting on a horse became one of the most common sitting postures. In the design of Akhal-Teke, the aim is to revive this sitting posture and bring it into everyday human life; a way of sitting that is likely embedded in our historical memory and DNA.
On the other hand, in considering materials for Akhal-Teke, thorough research was conducted to ensure that sustainable and environmentally friendly options were taken into account. In this regard, the material identity chosen for Akhal-Teke is aligned with the core identity of its design. - Inspiration
- The design is inspired by my childhood experiences of horseback riding and my fascination with equine anatomy.
As a design student, I was drawn to the idea that saddles represent some of humanity's earliest forms of seating, dating back to the domestication of horses.
Through this design, I sought to capture the feel of both a lounge chair and the riding experience, creating a form that evokes those dual inspirations.
The name Akhal-Teke is derived from a breed of Turkmen horses.
Colors of Akhalteke Lounge Chair
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G0E23 ShopGrand Interview about Akhalteke Lounge Chair
First of all, I just want to say how happy I am that the life of Akhalteke has started and keeps growing, bringing along lovely conversations and real friendships that mean a lot to me.I’ve always wondered: why do certain specific ways of sitting become the “standard”? Why don’t we treat sitting, like any other human behavior, as something with many possibilities? This thought got me digging into my own memories of how I’ve sat in different moments of life. And the one that stood out the most was sitting in full contact and rhythm with a living, breathing creature, the horse. That deep, instinctive connection was unlike anything else. It was the seed that eventually grew into the Akhalteke.
As I mentioned, in the design of Akhalteke, sitting is approached as an experience, not as a simple act.For me, experience is a continuous and dialectical interaction between the user and the environment (everything that is not the user).It is within this dynamic that each user forms a unique relationship with the object, and new postures of sitting emerge, postures that are directly shaped by this interaction with the object. Ultimately, a new experience is created.
I believe a designer’s honesty is most clearly reflected in their choice of materials.In the case of Akhalteke, without this specific type of material, a significant part of its identity would be compromised, for very clear, tangible reasons. That’s wh, the object itself demands the use of these materials as an essential part of what defines it.
When we speak of sitting as an experience, a continuous and dialectical interaction between subject and object, sitting transforms from a simple act into a moment of pause.It is in this pause that the seat (the object) becomes part of the quality and depth of this stillness within the user’s (the subject’s) everyday flow.And this is precisely the point where a mutual relationship begins, one that leads to a unique experience of pausing, embodied in a particular posture and form.
I believe that part of experiencing something is intuitive.The main goal and function of the Akhalteke was to create a new sitting experience for the user. As a result, I had to arrive at a form that also gave importance to each user’s intuitive perception.To reach the final form, I tried to express the abstraction that had taken shape in my mind in the simplest way possible.
The horse was one of the first animals that humans were able to domesticate during their evolutionary journey.Domesticating the horse played an indirect yet significant role in the emergence of civilizations. But what’s particularly noteworthy is that humans spent long periods of time on horseback, in different postures and with various experiences.And I believe that’s precisely what led me to rediscover this way of sitting, in a new form.
These dimensions, considering the limitations of the conceptual form and experience-based design, were not derived from anthropometric studies. Instead, they were achieved through trial and error, using prototypes at different scales and ultimately constructing a one-to-one model to attain the best possible expression of the final intended feel of the work.
Akhalteke is the name of one of the Turkmen horse breeds, known for its beauty and delicate anatomy.However, the reason for choosing this name was seeing the deep and meaningful connection between the Turkmen people and their horses.The horse plays an important role in their lives, and I was seeking that same depth of presence in the experience.
As a design student, one of my greatest wishes is to be able to provide a meaningful solution through the design process, rather than becoming part of the problem itself!I hope that instead of offering merely superficial, trend-driven forms in response to needs, we can give authenticity to the act of experiencing.
Sustainability can be found in the relationship between design and the user.I deeply believe that the deeper this connection is, the more successful the design will be in rising above being just a consumer product and gaining a longer lifespan.Therefore, I believe time can be the final element of design that exists outside the designer’s process.The longer a design can live based on a meaningful relationship with its user, the more sustainable it is.