Header: Doyoung Kim
Baya is a lounge chair made of a bent stainless steel frame with thin strips of leather woven around it by hand. Natsumi Komoto designed it in June 2025 as her MA diploma project at the École Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne (ECAL for short), an art school in Switzerland. The design has recently been recognised as the winner of the “Lounge Chair” category of the SIT Furniture Design Awards.
Inspired by nests
Komoto’s thesis asked why humans feel the need to make things at all, and she went looking for an answer in the nests that animals build by instinct. A nest is put together in direct response to whatever is around it, so its function and its shape cannot be separated, and nothing about it is decoration. That gave her a way of thinking about the act of making something that sits outside any culture or period.
The chair shares its name with the baya weaver, a small bird found across South and Southeast Asia. The male builds the nest alone, tearing strips between 20 and 60 centimetres from paddy leaves, grasses and palm fronds and weaving them into a hanging house with a long tube that acts as a grand entrance. A single nest takes him about 18 days and as many as 500 trips back and forth to make.
“Nests, formed directly in response to their environment, are pure structures where function and shape are inseparable.”
Natsumi Komoto
Weaving the chair
The frame is made of stainless steel pipe, bent into curves on a CNC machine by DEC Cintrage, and Komoto treated it as the branches a bird would find and build between. The leather is cut into narrow strips and wrapped around the steel by hand, one strip at a time, until the frame disappears into a woven shell. Komoto picked leather as the counterpart to the steel because it is the oldest material people have worked with.
The two halves of the process are meant to be equally important, both structurally and aesthetically. The bending is done to a tolerance no hand could match, and the weaving is done in a way no machine could copy.
The sustainability aspect
The woven leather can be taken off and renewed while the steel frame is sturdy enough to last a long time. A chair that would otherwise be thrown out when its covering wears through can be brought back to life instead, which is Komoto’s most important aspect of this project.
“In a world of mass production and short-lived consumption, Baya quietly asks, ‘What does true sustainability mean?'”
Natsumi Komoto
Project information
Lead Designer: Natsumi Komoto
School: École cantonale d’art de Lausanne
Steel Frame: DEC Cintrage Sàrl
Photography: Doyoung Kim
Location: Lausanne, Switzerland
Date: June 2025
