There’s something quietly rebellious about seeing delicate leather straps wrapped around cold, hard steel. It’s unexpected, a bit contradictory, and exactly what makes Nara Lee’s Pul collection so captivating. The Paris-based architect just unveiled this sculptural furniture series at The Sun Room exhibition in Seoul, and it’s turning heads for all the right reasons.
What strikes you first about these pieces isn’t just their minimalist beauty, but the story they tell about urban nature. Lee drew inspiration from what she calls Seoul’s “wild nature,” those moments when the organic world refuses to be contained by concrete and glass. Think weeds breaking through sidewalk cracks, vines climbing up apartment buildings, or wildflowers blooming in forgotten corners. It’s nature being stubborn and beautiful in places it technically shouldn’t exist.
Designer: Nara Lee
The Pul collection channels this tension between the rigid and the organic through its material choices. Stainless steel provides the structure, all clean geometric lines and industrial precision. But then there are those leather ties that seem to hold everything together, adding warmth and tactility to pieces that could have been austere. The chairs are particularly striking, with backs that bend backwards in ways that feel both sculptural and functional.
What Lee has done here is create furniture that lives in the space between art object and everyday utility. These aren’t pieces that disappear into a room. They command attention, make statements, and start conversations. Yet they’re still fundamentally chairs, tables, and functional objects meant to be used rather than just admired from a distance.
The process behind the collection is just as interesting as the finished products. Lee combines industrial metalworking with traditional hand-crafted techniques, bringing together two worlds that don’t usually share space. The stainless steel gets precision-cut and welded using modern manufacturing methods, while the leather components require old-school craftsmanship and careful hand-stitching. It’s this marriage of high-tech and handmade that gives each piece its unique character.
There’s also something to be said about Lee’s choice to debut this collection in Seoul rather than in Paris, where she’s based. It feels intentional, like coming full circle with inspiration. The city that sparked the concept gets to see its wild nature reflected back through these striking furniture pieces. It’s a love letter to Seoul’s particular brand of urban beauty, where modernity and nature negotiate their coexistence daily.
The sculptural quality of the Pul collection places it firmly in that growing category of design that refuses to pick a lane between art and function. These are pieces that would look equally at home in a contemporary art gallery or a stylishly minimalist living room. That versatility is part of their appeal. They’re conversation starters that also happen to be incredibly practical. What makes this collection feel particularly relevant right now is its exploration of contrast. We’re living in an era obsessed with binaries and either-or thinking, but Lee’s work suggests there’s beauty in bringing opposites together. Hard and soft, industrial and organic, precise and imperfect. The Pul collection doesn’t try to reconcile these differences so much as celebrate them.
For anyone interested in where contemporary design is heading, the Pul collection offers some compelling hints. There’s a growing appetite for pieces that tell stories, that reference their cultural contexts, and that don’t sacrifice artistic vision for mass appeal. Lee’s work checks all those boxes while still maintaining a clean, approachable aesthetic that doesn’t require a degree in design theory to appreciate.
The leather straps aren’t just decorative elements or structural necessities. They’re the collection’s way of softening steel’s edge, of adding human warmth to industrial coolness. They represent the hand-crafted in conversation with the machine-made, the traditional meeting the contemporary. In a world increasingly dominated by algorithmic precision and mass production, there’s something refreshing about furniture that proudly shows the marks of human touch alongside industrial fabrication.
Nara Lee’s Pul collection proves that furniture can be more than just functional objects. It can be commentary, poetry, and practical seating all at once. And sometimes, the most interesting design happens when you let contradictions coexist rather than trying to resolve them.
The post Seoul’s ‘Wild Nature’ Just Inspired the Furniture Everyone Wants first appeared on Yanko Design.