Most furniture design moves in one direction: forward. New materials, new mechanisms, new ways of folding, stacking, or reconfiguring. What gets lost in that relentless forward motion is rarely discussed – but Turkish industrial designer Gökçe Nafak is making a quiet argument that something genuinely worth keeping was left behind somewhere along the way.
Her Osolo Long Seating Unit is a concept piece built around the sedir, a form of low built-in seating that was central to the traditional Turkish home for centuries. The sedir was placed along the walls of a room, built directly into the architecture, and upholstered with cushions and bolsters. It was low, linear, and multifunctional long before multifunctional furniture became a trend. It was also, eventually, displaced. During the 19th century, Western furniture styles – sofas, armchairs, dining sets – moved into Ottoman homes and reshaped the way interiors were organised and experienced. The sedir retreated, and then largely disappeared.
The Osolo is not a reproduction. It is a reinterpretation – one that takes the cultural logic of the sedir and rebuilds it around a piece of design thinking that feels entirely contemporary.
At the core of the Osolo series is a single-piece folded metal body that functions as both the structural frame and the visual foundation of the entire piece. That single decision carries an enormous amount of weight. The folded metal does not merely support the cushions – it defines the silhouette, gives the piece its architectural confidence, and creates an open cavity beneath the platform that serves as storage for books, magazines, and small objects. From the side, the curve of metal bending upward from the floor reads more like a building detail than a furniture leg. That is not an accident.
The profile sits deliberately low to the ground, continuing the sedir’s relationship with a room. Where most contemporary sofas push upward – higher seats, thicker cushions, more visual mass – the Osolo stays close to the floor, creating the kind of horizontal calm that high furniture rarely achieves.
What makes the Osolo genuinely practical rather than simply evocative is its modular logic. Independent backrest elements can be positioned wherever they are needed. Modular cushions tile across the platform in varying configurations. A single unit works in a compact space; multiple modules can connect side by side into one continuous seating arrangement that stretches the full length of a wall – which is, of course, exactly how the original sedir functioned. The cultural reference and the design solution turn out to be the same thing.
The integrated open shelf beneath the seat rethinks storage as something calm and easily accessible rather than hidden away or stacked. It keeps the things people actually reach for – books, remotes, a notebook – within arm’s reach without cluttering the surface above.
The Long Seating Unit is part of a wider body of work that Nafak has been developing under the Osolo name. An earlier piece in the series, the Osolo Meditation Chair, applies the same low-to-the-floor philosophy and integrated bookshelf thinking to a single-seat format, establishing the design language that the Long Seating Unit expands upon. Across the series, the folded metal body and the sedir reference remain constant – a coherent design language with a consistent cultural point of view.
Nafak is based in Ankara and has built her practice across furniture, product, and UX design, with the Osolo series representing perhaps her most personally rooted work. The piece has attracted significant attention in the design community since its release, and the interest makes sense. There are plenty of modular sofas on the market. There are very few that carry a genuine cultural argument within their structure.
The Osolo Long Seating Unit is currently a concept. Whether it reaches production remains to be seen, but as a piece of design thinking it is already very confident and very resolved – a piece of furniture that knows exactly what it is, where it comes from, and what it is trying to say. In a market that often mistakes novelty for meaning, that kind of clarity is rarer than it should be.
