The Twill Weave Daybed was developed in collaboration with Kvadrat, and the design concept of the daybed is an entire object made out of woven textile; the structural parts, the flexible parts, and the soft parts.

The inspiration for the textile design came about in 2016, while Jonathan Olivares was searching for a suitable upholstery-grade textile to pair with a carbon fiber twill weave textile. Olivares was developing a piece of furniture to the Philip Johnson Thesis House built in 1942, owned by Harvard University Graduate School of Design. The house on 9 Ash Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, was part of Johnson’s architectural exploration that informed his since famous Glass House. The original layout for the home featured Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Daybed, and Jonathan Olivares wanted to echo this for the space with a contemporary approach to the daybed.

Jonathan Olivares: “The construction of this textile was informed by the twill weave and color of carbon-fiber cloth. Carbon fiber is used in the construction of lightweight and strong components within the automotive, sailing, and sporting industries. The development of a sister textile in wool allows designers to pair the rigid or flexible components of carbon fiber with a soft upholstered component, resulting in a total object made entirely from twill weave cloth.”