They approached me a couple years ago to meet with them in Milan. I have to say that, initially, I was surprised — pleasantly surprised — that they had decided I would be a good fit for them. They could have easily reached out to a well-known industrial designer, but all the credit to them for being brave enough to work with someone slightly outside their world. That needs to happen more — as does companies reaching out to female designers.

The craftsmanship is really second to none. My first visit to the factory was unbelievable. But it wasn’t until touring the archive, and seeing some of the early pieces that are 100 years old, that I really started to find my connection to the brand. I realized that I clicked with the original Poltrona Frau, and that early part of the archive. I set out to bring a new take on that heritage — in particular, on the Vanity Fair armchair by Renzo Frau.

What I found out, consequently, was that Renzo Frau had come to England and was really inspired by the Chesterfield and the Club Chair — these 17th and 18th century English classics. He brought them back to Italy, and gave them more of an Italian feel. I think that history appealed to me because of my background working as the interiors editor at the World of Interiors magazine, where I was in contact with all sorts of antiques.

As a child, if you were to draw a chair, that’s the one that you’d outline. So I wanted to keep that strong, rigid frame, but then also to provide real comfort. Comfort is not something that I have always been preoccupied with — I’m more drawn to sculptural beauty — but because this was my first upholstered chair, it was very important to me here. So I wanted it to feel organic, but in a way that the organic was sort of contained. There’s a juxtaposition of the rigid and the soft, which is where the Squash name comes from.

My next visit to Poltrona Frau, I turned up with a cardboard box that had miniature models of a chair, a rug, a side table and a mirror. They asked, “Where are the CAD drawings?” but I told them we weren’t going to start with CAD. Instead, I went with them to the factory and started to sculpt in a more three-dimensional way. That isn’t the way that they usually work, and it was fantastic. We’d shape something, and then half an hour later it would come back partially fabricated in leather.

I think working with leather comes more easily to me than working with some other textiles, because leather naturally has a sculptural shape. And I did an earlier collaboration with Birkenstock, so I had already been working with leather in a different world. Of course, when you’re designing shoes, you’re not thinking about them lasting a lifetime. Whereas in my mind, this chair should look its best in 20 years. A lot of credit also goes to the development team. I brought comfort through the intent and the overall structure, but then they really delivered on shaping and finding the right angles to meet the highest standards of comfort.

Poltrona Frau has done a lot of really beautiful side tables and stools that stretch leather over a form. Instead, I thought it would be interesting to create a kind of container around the leather element. My children call it “the s’more” because the middle layer is like a marshmallow.

It’s going back to that British connection that I discovered in Vanity Fair. I started looking a lot at a 17th and 18th century English kind of folk leather game.

When I started my career, I was very much working only with heavy materials — steel and mesh and bronze — and I ignored all the decorative arts and anything textile. And in the past two or three years, I’ve been really enjoying textiles, because I feel like I finally found my language through translating my artworks. The Berber Moroccan technique is really good at that because it uses natural dyes that hold the looseness of the painting and the rush. I’m really enjoying having these rugs as a connection between my canvases and my furniture — they’re the canvas for everything else to work off.

We were ready for what we’d call in England a “Marmite reaction” — where someone feels one thing but smiles and tells you they love it. When I launched the Roly Poly chair, it took two years for that language to really be understood. So sometimes I feel when we are showing things that we’ll see [how people ultimately react to them] in the next year or so. But what we’re experiencing is that everybody genuinely loves it.

My gut instinct is that it’s what we need right now. The whole world has been through a really tough time, so I do want to see more colour and more patterns and I want to feel comfortable, nourished and protected. And I feel that is something that we all need. For the time we’ve just been in, it doesn’t feel right to be rigid and monochrome.

And with the red, it’s right from the archive. It’s the classic Vanity Fair colour, so it was very clear to me that to highlight that connection, it needed to be red. Plus, I love the boldness. There’s something really powerful about red — whether it’s red lipstick or a red sportscar, it has all these associations. And we all know it from the ‘70s, where it was used for a lot of furniture. We’re also showing Squash in blue, but it’s available in any one of the hundreds of Poltrona Frau leathers and fabrics.

It was years in the making. I think as a designer, sometimes there’s an expectation that you can maintain a level of creativity every year. For a few years, I haven’t felt that energy. But I arrived with something to say this year and it was great to see the reaction. Plus, it was fantastic to work with different houses. They’re all really good people — warm, open collaborators working with their own identity. At the end of the day, this is how we spend our time. And I feel like the end user will sense if we have had a good experience. The pieces have the heart and soul of that collaboration inside them, and I think people can feel that when they sit in them.