Maximo Riera’s Animal Collection

Spanish artist Maximo Riera doesn’t design furniture so much as he sculpts it into being. His ongoing Animal Chair Collection reimagines seating as a kind of biological homage: chairs and sofas modeled with unnerving anatomical precision on real creatures, from the ocean’s largest mammals down to the toad underfoot. The effect sits somewhere between furniture, taxidermy, and fine art — and that ambiguity is exactly what Riera is after. As his own studio describes the project, it’s an attempt to reflect the beauty and vitality of the natural world in an object built for the most domestic of settings, the living room.

The Animal Chair collection constitutes a diverse range of species, from mammals to reptiles, and even including insects. Each creation retains the animal’s natural vitality whilst being totally biologically accurate in their appearance. This collection is homage to these animals and the whole animal kingdom which inhabits our planet, as an attempt to reflect and capture the beauty of nature in each living thing.

The Toad Chair pictured above was the collection’s first two-seater, and it plays that ambiguity for everything it’s worth. Riera modeled it on the common toad found across Europe and North Africa, deliberately leaving off the head and turning the animal’s broad, warty back into the seating surface itself. A tufted leather cushion sinks into the sculpted form like a throne grown directly out of the amphibian’s spine. As DesignBoom described it when the piece debuted, the design is content simply “being truthful to himself even if kissed by a princess” — a wry nod to the fairy tale, and to the collection’s whole argument that ugliness, looked at closely enough, becomes its own kind of beauty.

Riera has been developing the collection since around 2008, first unveiling a piece — the Octopus Chair — at the London Design Week in 2010. Every chair begins as a sketch, gets translated into a three-dimensional digital model, and is then carved from dense blocks of high-density polyurethane foam before being hand-assembled, glued, sanded, and painted component by component. It is, by any measure, an absurd amount of labor for a place to sit. When DesignBoom first covered the Toad Chair, each piece required roughly 170 hours of machine time and 160 hours of hand labor spread across an eleven-week production run, with every unit built to order and, as a result, genuinely one-of-a-kind. By the time NUVO magazine profiled the collection a few years later, that figure had grown to nearly 450 hours per chair, with more than thirty specialists — some borrowed from workshops that also do finishing work for Ferrari and Chanel — touching every piece before it leaves the studio.

The earliest editions in the series, including the Toad Chair, were finished entirely in glossy black — a choice that flattens the distinctions between species into one unified material language, more sculpture than upholstery. Later pieces in the collection moved toward tones and textures pulled directly from the animals’ real hides, with cracks, folds, and creases worked into the surface to heighten the illusion of skin rather than foam.

Each chair in the wider collection reads like a study of how an animal actually holds itself. The Octopus Chair, Riera’s very first piece in the series, wraps eight sculpted arms around an empty seat, suckers rendered in obsessive detail, so that sitting in it feels less like taking a place beside the animal than being folded into its embrace. The Rhino Chair works almost as a throne: its armored back and lowered head form a raised backrest reinforced internally so the piece can bear real weight despite looking, from across a room, like solid volcanic stone. The Walrus Chair rounds everything out into soft, blubbery mass, with a pair of carved tusks repurposed as armrests. And the Whale Chair, shown here from both the front and the rear, curls its flippers forward to cradle the sitter while its tail fluke rises dramatically behind the seat back, turning the whole object into something closer to a breaching sculpture than a place to sit down.

Whatever you make of the philosophy behind it, the Animal Chair Collection sits at an unusually confident intersection of art, craft, and industrial design — closer in spirit to the obsessive hand-built work we cover in Craft & Making than to anything you’d find in a furniture showroom. Explore more object design pushing past convention in our Design pillar, and if you’re curious about the materials and makers behind pieces like this one, our Reference Library is a good place to keep digging.