A young woman with red curly hair and freckles relaxing on a beige couch with her eyes closed, resting her head on a pillow, and wearing a dark gray t-shirt, colorful bracelets, and a necklace in a sunlit room.

Simplicity is comfortable.

Airline cabins are not cosy places. They are hectic, full of people, noise and regulatory restrictions. Most business class seats claim to be home from homes, relying on complex mechanisms to transform from one mode to another.

Would the experience be better if we kept it simple?

A woman sleeping in an airline seat with a pillow, watching an in-flight entertainment screen.
First-class airplane seat with a dark blue cushion, a striped pillow, a small side table with a glass of water, and a personal entertainment screen.

Protecting this simple idea was not a simple challenge. Airline cabins are jam-packed of requirements, from head-strikes to protecting against trollies, miles of cabling and ever larger screens.

Designing a beautiful, minimal seat was straightforward, keeping it looking it that was once ready for flight was another matter.

The airline cabin went onto win the Crystal Cabin award in 2022.

When you are at home, getting comfortable on the sofa, you don’t press a bunch of buttons to get cosy. You squidge the cushions, maybe grab a throw if its cold and probably wiggle a bit to get fully comfortable. Or maybe you turn around, put your feet up and doom-scroll for awhile.

Understanding this behaviour, helped all stakeholders to rethink their assumptions and allowed us to reimagine the cabin.

Interested in how we did this?