You Feel Scale Before You Have Words for It
Scale reaches the body before the language for it does. It’s impossible not to feel the effects of proportion and scale the moment you enter any space. It’s in the height of the ceiling that you break your neck to see, in the width of the doorway that you're comfortable leaning against, or the size of the chair that feels too low for dinner or too upright for comfort. All of it hits you, instantly and without conscious thought. They’re the quiet mechanics of how a space tells you what to do with yourself.
Yuliet Carbonell has spent her career paying attention to those moments. Here at Residence Supply, her exploration of proportion and scale are giving birth to a furniture division anchored in the study of feeling in relationship to the space around us. Here, we get to explore scale, proportion, memory, and imagination while channeling what we find into the form of a chair, an ottoman, or a sofa.
Childhood Is Where We Learn to Understand Spaces
Born and raised in Cuba, Carbonell was surrounded by architecture built to overwhelm a child’s sense of self. The colonial mansions of the old town with their courtyards and grand staircases, the Malecón unspooling for miles along the sea, facades layered with Baroque flourish, it all connected in her mind like regions within a private fantasy world. The ceilings floated impossibly high, and the staircases were steep. Of course those proportions had their reasons. They were necessary engineering designed to move air through a room as a natural response to a very punctual heat. But kids feel architecture and design more than they understand it. And what Carbonell felt was grandeur. "The structures felt larger than life, you know? Everywhere you look, you’re always looking up and around because everything was really big," she says. There was one staircase, in her mother's cousin's home that really frightened her. It was too steep and too tall to her. It was useful technically, but to her, it became an early example of the power of scale.
Furniture Should Fit People, Not Just Houses
Sitting across from each other in the office kitchen, we discussed how those early childhood impressions collided with what she learned through her career. Her time at Rejuvination, taught her the discipline of the trade and the process of standardized creation at the corporate scale. It also helped her understand where she sees the opportunity to do things differently.
“Traditional brands,” she explained, “often scale their furniture toward the customer with the enormous house you know? They have the tall backrests, the oversized frames, and products with extreme dimensions to fill rooms most people don't have. It’s not a bad thing, but it limits you. And when you’re designing products that are big for the sake of being big, it doesn’t do anything for the person or the space you’re designing for.”
I had to put a pin in that; this idea of not designing something big just for the sake of making something big. Why do we do that? There’s a whole world of design hiding inside that mistake. It’s easy to say that started with social media but long before Instagram we were making and building astonishingly useless things at scales or in proportions that spoke to our vanity or greed more than it acknowledged the true desires of the user. Carbonell isn't interested in monoliths of her creativity that never get enjoyed. Instead, she's much more curious about the point where proportion meets consumer behavior.
Ask her about a chair and she’ll talk about the body before she talks about its style.
“If we’re talking about a seat, seat height is everything,” she says. “The seat is the part of the furniture most connected to the body. Even if you think about the angle from seat to backrest, or from the seat to the floor, the body you have in mind when designing the chair will guide you.”
Her perfect point for chair height stands around seventeen and a half inches. Anything lower and it reads as casual and a little playful. Higher, and it can read formal and even intimidating. Every shift in proportion can change the feeling of an object. A backrest can make you behave, or it can help you exhale.
Good Design Starts With Imagination
When I asked how much of furniture design is engineering and how much is imagination, she said eighty-twenty. Then immediately she emphasized the importance of the twenty.
"Without imagination," she says, "you can't produce the piece."
Her own imagining isn’t a clean process. "It's so messy," she admits laughing a little. "There's no process really. I can get inspired by historical furniture, from abstract sculptures, or from random objects that I can’t forget about. Then it’s like the forms and shapes put themselves together in my head, and then I work through its viability when I start working on it.”
It's the same associative, magpie imagination that knows a chair doesn’t need to be born from utility exclusively; it can begin its life as a memory of a staircase, a sculpture, or even the feeling of the city.
What Happens When You Change the Scale?
Before we left, I made sure to get her homework for you all, so take note.
“Take one piece in your living room; it could be a chair, a lamp, a table, and imagine it in a material, a fabric, or a color you would never normally choose,” she says. “Push the proportions, borrow something from mid-century, or from further back, and see if you can bring it into the present by playing with its scale. See what it does to the room. See what it does to you.”
Most of us live around objects we stopped seeing a long time ago. Yuliet Carbonell’s assignment invites us to see the fantasy in the everyday and challenge us to exercise our imagination a bit more.
Make things stranger. Make things a little lower. Make things a little brighter. Play around with the proportions and scale on display in your home, and see what inspires in you.
You might be pleasantly surprised at what you learn about yourself in the process.
This conversation with our furniture designer Yuliet Carbonell is part of Residence Supply's Power of Imagination campaign, exploring how creativity shapes the objects we live with, and in the spaces we love.
