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Celebrating 20 years of Delta
Two decades is a long time for a sofa to remain a best seller. But the Delta is no ordinary sofa…
The year was 2005, and the Australian designed Delta II was selected from a world of sofas to appear on Oprah as part of a room makeover of a beautiful New York apartment. After going to air, viewers swamped King Living, emailing the company for information about the sofa and where they could buy it. Unfortunately, they were out of luck, as King Living had no American presence.
The following year, the Delta was selected as the sofa of choice for the 2006 Vanity Fair Oscars party, after the organisers spotted it in an issue of House and Garden Magazine.
More than 90 pieces were shipped to LA, consisting of Delta squares, rectangles and backs. The sofas were assembled as U-shaped settings around the outside of the main room, while the square sections (ottomans) were situated in the centre, clipped together in various formations.
After the party, the sofas were returned to Australia, where King Living sold them off and donated the proceeds to a children’s charity. In 2007, Vanity Fair purchased the sofas outright to use for future events, including the glamorous Cannes Film Festival.
When introduced in 1998, the Delta revolutionised Australian furniture. Its modular steel-framed construction was unlike anything we’d ever known, allowing a degree of flexibility that meant it could fit into corners, or expand to fill a room. And with adjustable backrests, it could become a chaise longue, three-seat armless sofa, or even a queen-size bed.
Created by King Living founder David King at his design studio in Sydney’s Camperdown (since moved to Turrella), the brief was to produce a sofa that would combine unsurpassed adaptability, with durability and comfort.
“We started our business selling foam modular sofas at Paddy’s Markets, back in 1977.
From that we understood the power of flexibility, where people could arrange the furniture in their rooms as they wanted, and if they moved house, they could change the furniture around to suit their new space.”
David took that same design philosophy and applied it to a contemporary modular sofa with a robust, but comfortable steel frame. This was the Delta.
“A lot of people said the Delta solved the problem of flexibility and adaptability that no other furniture had at that time,” David says. “It’s the biggest selling sofa of its type in Australia, with more than 100,000 sold, and they are now hugely popular in Asia; in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore.
“The Delta actually won an award at the Shanghai International Furniture Exhibition; only problem is we didn’t make it…our design had been slavishly copied!”
Over the next twenty years, the Delta has become one of the biggest success stories of Australian design history. The original Delta has evolved to become the Delta III, with Smart Pockets, plus optional under-seat storage, integrated LED reading lamp, swivel table and smartphone charge table. An all-weather outdoor version of the Delta also became available in 2011.
Neale Whitaker (The Block, and Love it or List it) is an Ambassador for King Living, and a big fan of the Delta. “It’s such a classic piece of Australian designed furniture,” says the former editor of Belle and Vogue Living. “I’m trying to avoid using clichés, but sometimes when you talk about these things it’s difficult not to use words like timeless and classic, but the Delta is both of those things.
“It is genuinely the perfect backdrop to pretty much any interior style. I’ve seen it working perfectly in the most contemporary, raw industrial settings, or in the most traditional country-style setting. It seems to fit anywhere; it’s a real chameleon. I’ve used the Delta in the new series of Love it or List It” (airing in September).
A multitude of Australian interior designers still specify the Delta in their projects and it continues to sell well off the showroom floor.
“In this day and age, for a design still to be a best seller after 20 years is pretty good going,’ says Whitaker. The Delta is now being bought by a completely different generation to the original generation who bought it. That’s pretty damn special.”
Click here to view the Oscars 2007 After Party gallery.
