Kusheda Mensah is designing her way out of the loneliness epidemic, one squiggly chair at a time

British-Ghanaian designer Kusheda Mensah says your sofa is making you lonely.

Kusheda Mensah makes chairs that look like they belong in a fever dream, and if you’ve ever been at a party surrounded by people you actually like and still somehow felt alone, Kusheda has opinions about whose fault that is. (It is the sofa’s.)

Kusheda is a British-born Ghanaian designer based in south-east London, and her studio, Modular by Mensah, is built on a belief she’s never really been shy about doubling down on: standard sofas face televisions. Standard chairs face forward. Standard rooms are, by design, full of people who are technically together and experientially alone. The solution, as it turns out, involved a lot of fabric and very few right angles.

via Dezeen

Kusheda enrolled at the London College of Fashion because, as she told AnOther Magazine, “I love drawing and thought I wanted to be a fashion designer, like every 17 year old does in London.” She hated it. She took a gap year then decided to pivot to Surface Design at LCC, where she was happier making textiles but kept getting distracted by the furniture the textiles were going on. “This is really boring,” she told Azure Magazine, looking at what she was making fabric for. “I should start making the actual pieces.” So she started screen-printing suede onto modular forms based on whatever she was feeling that day, and her final year project was, in retrospect, a baby version of her flagship piece, the Squiggle. Her parents, who came from Ghana and worked to make a living in London, were watching their daughter build giant shapes for a degree. “I didn’t know you could do something like this,” she has said of the gap between their experience and hers.

What pulled her toward three-dimensional work was Verner Panton, the Danish designer who spent the 1970s building entire rooms out of undulating foam landscapes instead of chairs. Kusheda looked at photos of people sprawled across Panton’s biomorphic interiors and asked herself a question that now basically runs her entire practice: “Why don’t we sit like that?” Mix that with the communal logic of a Ghanaian household (where rooms rearrange themselves depending on who is visiting and furniture is always doing at least two things at once) and you end up with furniture that has very strong feelings about your social life.

via Hypebeast

The Mutual collection, her 2018 debut at SaloneSatellite in Milan, was 20 interlocking pieces that Sight Unseen called “giant Picasso cut-outs,” fleshy and curved and upholstered in ribbed cream fabric, caramel leather, and that marigold velvet, pulling from Panton, Joan Miró, Jenny Saville, and Ellsworth Kelly. Kusheda was 27, fresh off a surface design degree, and showing at the biggest furniture fair in the world with a collection she had designed concept-first. “I decided to go with my instinct and design with my concept of social seating and think about functionality later,” she told Design Milk. “It meant my designs could be as wacky as I wanted them to be.” The practical observation underneath: “All the modular furniture I was looking at on the market is either rectangular or circular. It doesn’t resemble the human body. It’s very straight, but we have loads of curves.”

Here’s what wacky gets you: good luck scrolling through your phone when the person next to you is close enough to read your texts. The pieces are heavy, tactile, upholstered in fabrics that practically beg you to touch them, and arranged so that eye contact is the path of least resistance. “If someone came to sit next to you,” as Kusheda  put it to Azure Magazine, “it would be quite hard not to strike up a conversation.” Her stated design goal, per a Sight Unseen feature, is for people to “look another human in the eyes and intertwine their limbs while doing so.”

via SixtySix

She runs the studio made-to-order—”producing the things that people need, without the waste,” as she put it to More or Less Mag—and since Milan she’s picked up commissions from Adidas (social seating built from recycled foam and post-consumer PET), Clarks and Apartamento (a modular installation for the Desert Boot’s 70th anniversary), and the V&A for the 2024 London Design Festival. Her Palma pouf for Swedish brand Hem, launched at 3daysofdesign in Copenhagen, is a graphic palm frond that works as a footrest, a primary seat, or a sculptural conversation starter depending entirely on how your afternoon is going.

“I found that when I met up with friends or family, they often weren’t as happy as they looked on Instagram,” she reflected in that Design Milk interview, “but there was no way of knowing that unless I connected with them on an emotional level, face to face.” She’s described herself as a Pisces invested in other people “to a fault,” and treats furniture as the most direct fix available—you can’t algorithmically curate the whimsical joy of a Squiggle.

Modular by Mensah’s ‘Squiggle’ via Port Magazine

“I don’t think I’ll be designing furniture for the rest of my life,” she said in that same interview. She grew up in south-east London walking past the Peckham Library, Will Alsop’s copper-clad Stirling Prize winner with the skinny steel columns at random angles and the reading room suspended in the air, and she wants to put her own sculptural installations in those public spaces, alongside running mentorship programs for young designers who don’t yet know this career exists. She told More or Less Mag she set out to “be an example to other black girls” so that future generations “cannot say there aren’t enough black women furniture designers.”

Back in south-east London, she works from the window of her living room, where a semi-circular pouffe in off-white and brown checkerboard Kvadrat twill doubles as a desk chair for her and a playground for her two children, Sior and Soleil. “Things can be so simple,” she told PORT Magazine from that room on an early spring morning. “I’m always thinking about how I want people to feel.” Considering she probably said that from a pouffe her four-year-old had been using as a seesaw ten minutes earlier, simple seems to be working out fine.

Written By: HQ

Kusheda Mensah makes chairs that look like they belong in a fever dream, and if you’ve ever been at a party surrounded by people you actually like and still somehow felt alone, Kusheda has opinions about whose fault that is. (It is the sofa’s.)

Kusheda is a British-born Ghanaian designer based in south-east London, and her studio, Modular by Mensah, is built on a belief she’s never really been shy about doubling down on: standard sofas face televisions. Standard chairs face forward. Standard rooms are, by design, full of people who are technically together and experientially alone. The solution, as it turns out, involved a lot of fabric and very few right angles.

via Dezeen

Kusheda enrolled at the London College of Fashion because, as she told AnOther Magazine, “I love drawing and thought I wanted to be a fashion designer, like every 17 year old does in London.” She hated it. She took a gap year then decided to pivot to Surface Design at LCC, where she was happier making textiles but kept getting distracted by the furniture the textiles were going on. “This is really boring,” she told Azure Magazine, looking at what she was making fabric for. “I should start making the actual pieces.” So she started screen-printing suede onto modular forms based on whatever she was feeling that day, and her final year project was, in retrospect, a baby version of her flagship piece, the Squiggle. Her parents, who came from Ghana and worked to make a living in London, were watching their daughter build giant shapes for a degree. “I didn’t know you could do something like this,” she has said of the gap between their experience and hers.

What pulled her toward three-dimensional work was Verner Panton, the Danish designer who spent the 1970s building entire rooms out of undulating foam landscapes instead of chairs. Kusheda looked at photos of people sprawled across Panton’s biomorphic interiors and asked herself a question that now basically runs her entire practice: “Why don’t we sit like that?” Mix that with the communal logic of a Ghanaian household (where rooms rearrange themselves depending on who is visiting and furniture is always doing at least two things at once) and you end up with furniture that has very strong feelings about your social life.

via Hypebeast

The Mutual collection, her 2018 debut at SaloneSatellite in Milan, was 20 interlocking pieces that Sight Unseen called “giant Picasso cut-outs,” fleshy and curved and upholstered in ribbed cream fabric, caramel leather, and that marigold velvet, pulling from Panton, Joan Miró, Jenny Saville, and Ellsworth Kelly. Kusheda was 27, fresh off a surface design degree, and showing at the biggest furniture fair in the world with a collection she had designed concept-first. “I decided to go with my instinct and design with my concept of social seating and think about functionality later,” she told Design Milk. “It meant my designs could be as wacky as I wanted them to be.” The practical observation underneath: “All the modular furniture I was looking at on the market is either rectangular or circular. It doesn’t resemble the human body. It’s very straight, but we have loads of curves.”

Here’s what wacky gets you: good luck scrolling through your phone when the person next to you is close enough to read your texts. The pieces are heavy, tactile, upholstered in fabrics that practically beg you to touch them, and arranged so that eye contact is the path of least resistance. “If someone came to sit next to you,” as Kusheda  put it to Azure Magazine, “it would be quite hard not to strike up a conversation.” Her stated design goal, per a Sight Unseen feature, is for people to “look another human in the eyes and intertwine their limbs while doing so.”

via SixtySix

She runs the studio made-to-order—”producing the things that people need, without the waste,” as she put it to More or Less Mag—and since Milan she’s picked up commissions from Adidas (social seating built from recycled foam and post-consumer PET), Clarks and Apartamento (a modular installation for the Desert Boot’s 70th anniversary), and the V&A for the 2024 London Design Festival. Her Palma pouf for Swedish brand Hem, launched at 3daysofdesign in Copenhagen, is a graphic palm frond that works as a footrest, a primary seat, or a sculptural conversation starter depending entirely on how your afternoon is going.

“I found that when I met up with friends or family, they often weren’t as happy as they looked on Instagram,” she reflected in that Design Milk interview, “but there was no way of knowing that unless I connected with them on an emotional level, face to face.” She’s described herself as a Pisces invested in other people “to a fault,” and treats furniture as the most direct fix available—you can’t algorithmically curate the whimsical joy of a Squiggle.

Modular by Mensah’s ‘Squiggle’ via Port Magazine

“I don’t think I’ll be designing furniture for the rest of my life,” she said in that same interview. She grew up in south-east London walking past the Peckham Library, Will Alsop’s copper-clad Stirling Prize winner with the skinny steel columns at random angles and the reading room suspended in the air, and she wants to put her own sculptural installations in those public spaces, alongside running mentorship programs for young designers who don’t yet know this career exists. She told More or Less Mag she set out to “be an example to other black girls” so that future generations “cannot say there aren’t enough black women furniture designers.”

Back in south-east London, she works from the window of her living room, where a semi-circular pouffe in off-white and brown checkerboard Kvadrat twill doubles as a desk chair for her and a playground for her two children, Sior and Soleil. “Things can be so simple,” she told PORT Magazine from that room on an early spring morning. “I’m always thinking about how I want people to feel.” Considering she probably said that from a pouffe her four-year-old had been using as a seesaw ten minutes earlier, simple seems to be working out fine.

Written By: HQ

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