LITTLE FLUFFY CLOUDS

“So what were the skies like when you were young?,” an interviewer once asked Rickie Lee Jones. “They ran on forever,” she responded. “We lived in Arizona and the skies always had little fluffy clouds…The most beautiful skies as a matter of fact. The sunsets were purple and red and yellow and on fire, and the clouds would catch the colors everywhere.” So go the first few lines of one of the most famous chill-out songs of all time, The Orb’s “Little Fluffy Clouds,” which the group’s producer, Youth, once described simply: “She launched into a trippy monologue about stars and clouds. I sampled it and put it over a basic pulse.”

How do you transmute such an iconic and hypnagogic song into a piece of furniture? It took a skateboarding injury, a pandemic, and the Los Angeles sky, but Jonathan Olivares has the answer. The designer, who is currently the creative director of Knoll, approaches furniture the way others approach material science — sourcing from aerospace suppliers and architectural metal fabricators, cataloging office chairs with taxonomic rigor — but his real obsession, as he told PIN–UP in 2022, is with what a chair can hold besides a body: “family, friendship, confidence, respect, creativity, and spontaneity — all of that can happen while you're sitting on a chair.”

For Little Fluffy Clouds, a personal project that he debuted during Milan’s Design Week last month, the point of departure was a recovery posture he learned from a sports trainer after a skateboarding injury: feet elevated above the heart, bodily strain redistributed. The hammock-like form he developed is more closely related to the material landscape of physical therapy than to conventional domestic seating — and it’s upholstered in a cloud pattern derived from photographs he took of the Los Angeles sky during the unusually clear days of the 2020 lockdown. The effect is that you lie within the clouds depicted on the surface, floating between a state of recuperation and contemplation.

Olivares installed the chaise in a darkened basement dance floor filled with haze, a synthetic fragrance, and dim light. Soft spotlights illuminated the suspended fog so that it gathered into bright, cloud-like formations, dissolving the room’s perimeter from view, with “Little Fluffy Clouds” looping continuously in the background. If chill out music is the softer side of euphoria, a comedown for the ecstatic raver, Olivares’s chaise similarly turns rest and relaxation into its own atmospheric condition.