“I sold my Maybach to get the Royère,” Kanye West told Architectural Digest in 2020. Maybach—the ultra-luxury German car—is a standard lyrical flex in hip-hop, but the French interior designer Jean Royère is not. The wildly eccentric rap and fashion mogul was referencing his “Polar Bear” couch, which can command up to $740,000 for an original production. That’s not the only six-figure sofa that West owns, either. West also has a colossal “Dune” sofa designed by Pierre Paulin, with an estimated price tag of $150,000. Frank Ocean has the same one, in the exact same shade of blue, too.
Now, enter Pharrell Williams. In a photo posted to Instagram this month, the boundary-pushing creative and pop star can be seen lounging on a statement sofa of his own, a sprawling enclosure of red upholstery. However, his is not from the hand of Jean Royère nor Pierre Paulin, but by the forward-thinking German designer Luigi Colani.
It’s the “Pool” sofa, a modular and space-age seating system designed in the 1970s by Colani for the German manufacturer Rosenthal. The company started producing painted porcelain objects before moving into entire dinnerware collections. However, in 1961, the company introduced the Rosenthal Studio Line, which saw the company collaborate with figures in fashion and fine art like Kenny Scharf and Gianni Versace. By the 1970s, the sub-label had expanded to include furniture design, including work from Verner Panton, Herbert Selldorf, and Colani.
Much like Rosenthal, Colani’s career was also delightfully meandering. He designed super sports cars for Fiat, Volkswagen, and BMW. He worked with Canon to develop the T90 camera, groundbreaking for its ergonomic design, and Sony to produce audio headphones with a delicate design, which bear an uncanny resemblance to the tiny earbuds of today. Colani’s furniture and decor seemed to indulge his more idiosyncratic impulses. His lounge chairs resemble a tongue mid-lick of a lollipop, while his teapots look like something you might light up and smoke. His “Pool” sofa played into the popularity of the conversation pit, allowing anyone to add a similar vibe to one’s home without actually having to do any construction. As the name suggests, the curved silhouette resembles a shallow pool.
The design is no longer in production, and it is a significant collector’s piece. One will rarely pop up on the market, selling almost instantly. A “Pool” sofa the size of Pharrell’s would likely sell in the $60,000 range; his looks to be the complete set, which has a total of 37 components. Smaller configurations also show up for sale, too.
A smaller configuration of the "Pool" sofa with new black velvet upholstery that sold for $12,000; Courtesy of 1stDibs.
Colani, who died a few years ago at age 91, once told a German newspaper that he was not a designer but “a three-dimensional philosopher of the future.” The “Pool” sofa was boldly futuristic when it was first released. At the time, Colani’s work was divisive—some found it too conceptual, veering into the territory of unrealistic and impractical. Others saw him as an iconoclast; a “visionary in an unimaginative world,” as his obituary stated. It’s easy to see why Pharrell might have been drawn to his work. Pharrell has always been a forward thinker himself, a trailblazer who has affected the shape of modern fashion and contemporary music. Of course, his sofa would be anything but ordinary.
