Simone

What guided you when you started to design Simone?

Bella Molyneux: The first thing that I was interested in was where this piece was gonna live, and for me that wound up being the entryway, and that wound up informing a lot of the features that I wanted it to have including a shoe rack or space to set things down, how thick the cushion should be, and just the overall shape and size of the piece.

Were there any key moments of change during this process?

BM: There was a point in the term where I was listening to a lot of music and there was a particular lyric that definitely changed the design that I was going for, and that lyric was “close the door and set the day down” from a song called Miss Simone, and that just made me realize that I wanted to create a piece that broke off the outside from the inside, the domestic world, so that when you came home you could kind of shed your burden and just get to enjoy the home life and the people that you love and the space that makes you feel comfortable and safe.

What was your greatest success in this project?

BM: I would say that it's a very lived-in piece I think it fills all the intentions that I originally made it for. My current prototype is something that gets used every day, it gets used when I come home from school, set my shoes on it, and toss my keys on it. We use it at dinner parties to seat people. So it's definitely something that's kind of held up to the purpose that I intended it for, I'm very very pleased with that