Modular Seating Layouts, Built in 3D Before You Buy
Modular seating has always had an awkward step in the middle. You pick a range, you like the fabric, and then you have to work out how seven different units become the sofa you had in your head, usually on the back of an envelope. The Mawsley, Harlestone and Brixworth ranges have a modular seating layout builder: you put the units together in 3D, see how much floor they take up, and add the whole layout to your basket in one go.
The old way was a printed plan and a phone call to check which side a corner unit had its back on. The new way looks nicer, but that is not why I like it. I like it because it catches mistakes before they are on a pallet.
How the modular seating layout builder works
Open the Mawsley modular office soft seating page and there are two tabs under the short description. “Shop individual items” is the page as it always was, for buying one unit at a time. “Build a layout” is the new one.
Pick a starting shape, or design your own. The ready-made shapes are drawn to scale and priced in whatever options you have already chosen on the page: pairs, rows, L-shapes, U-shapes, booths and islands, wherever the range can make them.
Add, swap and remove units. Click a unit and a panel opens for it. Swap it for a curve or a corner, give it its own back or fabric, or take it out.
Check the sizes. The main picture becomes your layout. Look at it in 3D or flat from above as a plan, and switch the sizes on to see the width and depth in metres.
Add the layout to your basket. The price and delivery date keep up as you go, and everything goes in as one grouped set of lines.
It will not let you build nonsense
This is my favourite part, which is an odd thing to say about a web page. A layout goes together as a chain, from left to right as you face the seats. An end unit with its arm on the left can only start a run, and one with its arm on the right can only finish it. The builder will not put an arm in the middle of a sofa or let two units overlap. If something cannot go somewhere, it tells you why, which matters more than it sounds.
The classic modular mistake is ordering two left-hand ends and finding out when the second box is opened.
Curves behave themselves too. On Mawsley, a 90° curve with its back on the outside turns the seats inwards, so three of them make a booth. One with its back on the inside turns them outwards, and four of those make a round island. The D-end unit wraps one row round to the row behind it, back to back, and two D-ends with a row either side make a capsule island.
One set of choices, with sensible exceptions
Back height and upholstery colour are chosen once for the whole layout, and they carry across both tabs, so a fabric picked in one is picked in the other. If a unit in your layout is not made in the back you chose, it gets the closest version it does come in, and its row tells you. In the screenshot above the layout is set to High Back, the selected unit only comes in Low Back, and the page says so plainly. Better now than on delivery day.
You can also break the rule on purpose. Each unit can take its own upholstery colour, so a run of grey with one yellow corner is two clicks, not a phone call. Whether it is a good idea is between you and your office.
Why it is worth doing before the van turns up
A layout on screen is honest about size in a way a product photo is not. A Mawsley central unit is 55cm wide and 71cm deep, which sounds modest until you join a few of them to a corner and some curves and the plan tells you the whole thing is more than four metres across. Better to find that out from a plan than in a corridor. The sizes are the seating itself, so leave room in front for knees and for people walking past.
The delivery date on a layout is the date the last unit arrives, because a sofa without its corner is not really a sofa. Each unit is priced as the real item it is, ex VAT, at the same price you would pay for it on its own. There is no layout premium and no quote to wait for.
If someone else signs off the spend, the layout lives in the page address. Copy the link, send it on, and it opens on the same arrangement in the same fabric you built.
Where to find it
The builder is live now on Mawsley, the Harlestone modular office soft seating and the Brixworth modular office soft seating, and you can see the rest in our modular seating range. The ready-made Mawsley sets link through to it too.
If the purple in the screenshot has won you over, the rest of our purple office furniture is one click away. If it has not, there are other colours. I will not take it personally.
Contents
Product Manager
Picks the ranges and knows which chair suits which back.