Johnston Marklee

For architects Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, putting furniture pieces together in a room is akin to putting buildings together to form a city. “Whenever we’re designing environments, it’s about the relationship between objects in the room, how you move in it, and occupy it,” they say. “Furniture is connected to the building as a part of the architecture.”

Their firm, Johnston Marklee, was founded in Los Angeles in 1998. Since then, they’ve designed a custom series of benches and tables to complement their architectural vision for the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, Texas, as well as other built-ins for architectural commissions, including the Knoll Store in West Hollywood, California. Yet, their Biboni™ Sofa marks the first time the duo puts a piece of furniture into production. The design draws on Johnston and Lee’s ongoing investigations of the presence of forms in space, how space structures itself into volumes, voids, and curvatures, and how light and shadow can sculpt forms.

Johnston Marklee has completed a diverse portfolio of buildings in a career spanning almost three decades, including Vault House in Oxnard, California, Pavilion of Six Views in Shanghai, China, and Dropbox Global Headquarters in San Francisco, California. Their work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Menil Collection, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Architecture Museum of TU Munich.