How Modular Sofas Became the Ultimate Furniture Flex

Welcome to Field Guide, a column by Sami Reiss of Snake covering all-time design and where you can find it.

Amanda Pratt landed on modular when moving from her Williamsburg apartment to a Soho loft a couple years ago. "I had all this cool vintage furniture and couldn’t fit it into the building’s elevator," says the interior architect and the owner of Salon Design, a Tribeca gallery. She custom ordered a modular sofa from Ffabb, a Canadian home furniture shop, and brought it into her place piece by piece. She’s since moved it around. Beyond the convenience, Pratt likes what she calls the sofa’s "flexibility of purpose." The sofa, in her words, "takes up a lot of space in a way that makes sense."

Modular sofas are more desirable now than they’ve been in a while. Important archival ones—like Ubald Klug’s descending Terrazza, and the ubiquitous Togo, both from 1973—are severely collectible and more expensive than they were a decade ago, regularly fetching high prices at auction. Searches for modular furniture, according to Google Trends, are also at a high, showing an aggressive upswing since 2004, which is when tracking for the data began. They have more than tripled in earnest since 2019. There are also now more accessible retail options than ever before—some direct to consumer, and dubious, and others from the likes of Ikea that provide an accessible entry point to the style.

In some cases, a modular sofa solves a spatial problem, as it did for Pratt. In others, the style makes a home’s living space multiuse. Earlier in June, at 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen, Vitra, the Swiss mobilier, debuted a modular sofa by Swiss design consultancy Panter & Tourron that it hopes is the latest addition to the functional canon. The Anagram, which will be available this September, is a "flexible platform" for seating, says the consultancy’s design principal Alexis Tourron. What it achieves feels fresh: A "non-directional object," the sofa isn’t designed to face a TV (or fireplace), and so can be arranged in more ways than a unidirectional sofa—or even some older ’70s modular models. Even with its broad footprint, logistically it’s smaller than it looks. The Anagram’s break-apart tech makes it easier to get it into a New York apartment than a traditional sofa.

Vitra’s new piece and more of today’s modular sofas are an inevitable progression from the functional, flexible furniture—and architecture—that evolved in the 20th century. As furniture that can come apart and is designed, so to speak, by the customer, modular encompasses rectangular storage, extendable from a small shelf to a wall, a bubbly sofa that can take over a room, and many things in between. This recombination and flexibility helps individuals with mutable living situations: an XL, four-piece modular sofa might be a centerpiece in a big apartment—with roommates—and get split up in a smaller one bedroom, or a house.

Modular as a concept, says Ron Witte, professor in residence of architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, may date as far back as the 18th century. "It really became formalized in the 1920s," he says. Witte cites Peter Behrens’s 1910 factory design, for AEG, the German electrical equipment manufacturer, as a prime example of modular: The factory was "modular in how it was laid out—repeated bays of structural columns—and the way that it was used." The factory space was flexible, and was able to accommodate improvements to its line. By the 1940s, modular design, specifically the flexible architecture of Herman Hertzberger, which allowed for multiple uses, became prominent for office spaces. Regarding furniture, other accounts place the genesis with Harvey Probber. An American designer, Prober catered to interior designers by producing almost anti-Eames furniture from the ’50s on. His most popular modular designs—big, regal sofas, like the Cubo and the Deep Tuft—were made up of smaller parts, like corner wedges, that created something more than a whole.

The bubbly modular aesthetic with sofas first peaked between 1970 and 1975. In the ’60s—during America’s short countercultural revolution—"people were loosening up," says Witte. Those same people, in the ’70s, had more disposable income. Sofas then were "a reinvention of a different kind of lifestyle," one that was more informal and loungy than what came out of strict ’20s futurism and its emphasis on the office environment. Pieces like the Terrazza departed from traditional sofas—and earlier, upright pieces by Probber—that predominated furniture beforehand. Says Witte of "proper" sofas: "You sat on them a certain way, you were upright, and your posture was correct." Compare this to how one might use De Sede’s long, undulating and low-slung Snake sofa, which takes over a room with its horizontality, or even a beanbag chair—a more downmarket expression, Witte says, of the ’70s modular style. 

These expressive couches were preceded by clinical, sometimes industrial storage options designed in the 1960s for office environments—think Vitsoe and USM Haller’s modular systems. They tended to fall into two categories. There are the elegant, designed items that happen to be modular: massive sofas like De Sede’s Snake, and the Mah Jong, by Roche Bobois, which stretches out flat, sometimes with pattern clash. In the same group is Klug’s Terrazza, which feels like a lazy set of mountains, and the Camaleonda, by B&B Italia, which is bubbly, rich, and low to the ground. For these sofas, Witte says, "the curve shape superseded the module." These are pieces which are defined by their aesthetic, and which just happened to be connectable—often with screws—and could be split apart. The module was secondary to the design, says Witte, and antagonistic to the gridded, 1920s modular concepts.