The Eagle’s Perch — Marondo Modular Sofa
Blue Forest design and build handcrafted luxury treehouses and bespoke outdoor structures, working with private clients to create spaces that feel genuinely removed from the everyday. The Eagle’s Perch is one of their signature treehouse projects, and the brief it generated was one of the most unusual and technically interesting commissions I have taken on.
The brief arrived as a sketch drawing, a dimensioned technical drawing of the space, and a set of inspiration photographs. The space itself presented an immediate challenge: a round room requiring a modular sofa built from wedge-shaped sections, each piece needing to relate precisely to the others while working independently as upholstered units. I built the frames from scratch using hardwood ply and small amounts of beech. My background in contract furniture manufacturing means I can read a brief quickly and make structural decisions with confidence — on a project like this, where the geometry is non-standard, that experience matters. The focus was on profiles that would give the maximum structural strength while providing the right foundation for the upholstery fillings above.
The sofa takes the form of what is sometimes called a pillow style — deep, relaxed cushions with a distinctly modern sensibility. The lineage of this form, to my knowledge, begins with Mario Marenco and the Marenco sofa system he designed for Arflex in 1970, now a recognised classic of Italian design. That reference felt particularly alive here: working from a designer’s sketch meant engaging seriously with what makes that form work — its proportions, the relationship between back and seat, the quality of the envelope — while producing something entirely bespoke that had not existed before. The Marondo name given to this sofa fuses the tondo form of the round room with the Marenco lineage it draws on.
It is the kind of project that sits at the intersection of furniture-making, spatial problem-solving, and design history — and exactly the kind of commission I find most rewarding.
