SOFTNOONS ARMCHAIR
By Omi Tahara, 2025

There is something particular about the sunlight on a summer day in Milan, a way it falls, a way it lingers. Omi Tahara understands this. And perhaps this is why Afternoons, the outdoor furniture collection he designed for De Padova in 2024, feels less like a set of objects than a distilled mood — an invitation, as he puts it, “to serenity and comfort with a book and a cup of tea.” Tahara was born in Kanagawa, Japan, in 1977. He trained not in furniture but in civil engineering. He is self-taught, which seems, in some unspoken way, to matter in his design practice. He moved to Milan in 2003 to work with Kazuhiko Tomita, later with Francesco Rota. Both shaped his approach. Italian design, for all its emphasis on form, is at its core about touch — how a material feels beneath the palm, how a chair cradles the body. Tahara, who established his own firm in 2011, has built his work around that corporeal sensibility, coupling it with an insistence on dialogue, real dialogue, with manufacturers. These are not high-level discussions, abstracted and remote. Tahara speaks to each factory worker. He considers this essential. First conceived for the outdoors, Afternoons is now moving in with Softnoons. The handwoven, natural-colored PVC, meant to mimic classic rattan, has given way to De Padova’s signature high-quality leather. This reversal of the usual order — indoor furniture, historically, goes out, not the other way around — is unexpected but not illogical. There is something in the relaxed silhouette that makes it feel at home anywhere. “I see it as a collection that embodies style, functionality, and production engineering, evident in the craftsmanship needed to handweave each of the collection’s elements,” Tahara said of the original outdoor design. These qualities have not been lost in the translation from outdoors to in; if anything, Softnoons only underlines them.