Material futures: Magis and the circular chair

The greenest piece of furniture is the one you never replace. A growing part of the Magis catalogue is designed squarely around that idea — sustainability treated as a manufacturing problem rather than a marketing badge.

That framing is characteristic of the house. Where others add a recycled material and call it progress, Magis tends to redesign the object so that keeping it is easier than discarding it.

Costume, designed for repair

Stefan Diez's Costume (2021) is a modular seat built on a shell of recycled, recyclable polyethylene, with covers that come off and go back on without tools — so a worn fabric, or a changed mind, no longer means a landfilled sofa. The 2024 Costume Lounge extends the same system lower, and outdoors.

Design for repair, and you design for keeping.

The tool-free cover is the whole thesis in one detail. Make a repair trivial and you change the economics of ownership: the sofa outlives its first fabric instead of dying with it.

A shared direction

It rhymes with Konstantin Grcic's Bell Chair, moulded from factory waste, and with Alessandro Stabile's Tacito, which quiets a room with soft felt doors instead of hard cabinetry. Different designers, one direction: less stuff, made better, kept longer.

What makes it convincing is that none of these pieces announce themselves as eco-products. They are simply good objects whose sustainability is built into how they are made and mended.

The same values, pointed forward

For a house that has always prized good manufacturing, circularity isn't a pivot. It is the same values, pointed at the next hundred years.

The line Magis repeats — a good product should last — turns out to be an environmental policy as much as a design one. Longevity was always the point; now it is also the plan.