Essay · 18 August 2026 · 6 min
Why Italian seating changed in the 1970s
Look at an Italian sofa from 1962 and one from 1972 and you are looking at two different ideas about how a person should sit. The earlier piece has legs. It stands in the room like a guest who has not yet been invited to stay. The later piece has no legs at all. It sits on the floor, it spreads, and it assumes you will lie on it.
Something happened between those two dates, and it was not only fashion. Foam changed. Manufacturers learned to mould polyurethane into shapes that did not need a wooden frame to hold them up, and once the frame was optional the whole grammar of seating opened up. Designers who had trained as architects began drawing furniture the way they drew buildings: in sections, in plans, as terrain.
The floor as a starting point
The most radical pieces of the decade share a single move. They lower the seat until it is almost on the ground and then compensate by widening it. Depth replaces height. The result is furniture that reads as a horizontal plane rather than an object, and that changes how a room is organised. A low sofa does not belong against a wall. It belongs in the middle.
This is why so many of these pieces still feel modern in contemporary interiors. They were designed for open, hard floored spaces with light coming from more than one side. That description fits more homes today than it did in 1972.
Depth replaced height. Furniture became a plane rather than an object.
What to look for now
Foam of that era does not last forever. When we look at Italian seating from the seventies we start underneath, checking whether the foam has been replaced, whether it has been replaced well, and whether the replacement respected the original density. A sofa that has been rebuilt with soft, cheap foam loses its outline and with it most of its point.
Upholstery is easier. Fabric can be redone. Form cannot. We buy the shape first and worry about the cover second, and we would rather have an honest, tired original than a bright, wrong one.