Every edition of Maison & Objet gives the design industry a language to think with. For 2026, that is “Pulse in Motion,” organised around four pillars: Union, Leadership, Elevation, and Intensity. Each one names something the industry is being asked to confront — about how people live, what they expect from the spaces around them, and what design owes them in return. At Domicil, we find ourselves in constant conversation with all four. The questions M&O is asking this year feel familiar. They are ones we have been working through, in our own way, for a long time.
1. Union: the sofa that shapes itself around you
M&O’s Union pillar is about rebuilding collective experience, design that grows and adapts around the people sharing a space rather than imposing a fixed arrangement on them. For a furniture brand, this is one of the most concrete challenges on the list.
Domicil’s response to it lives in the configurability of its sofa systems. Each piece can be specified across a range of sizes, configurations, leathers, and fabrics, with the same design reshaping around the needs of the household or the project rather than the other way around. A family room and a considered minimal apartment can begin from the same design brief and arrive at two entirely different results. That is what genuine configurability means in practice, and it is the same thing Union is pointing toward in principle: a designed environment that makes room for the people actually living in it.
2. Leadership: a reference point, not a new entrant
M&O frames Leadership as the assertion of creative authority, brands and makers positioning themselves as long-standing cultural reference points. It is an interesting pillar to sit with, because leadership in this sense is not claimed, but accumulated.
Domicil has been part of the German furniture conversation since 1978, founded in Weingarten by Brigitta Jaeggle, Armin Eberlein, and Hans Dahme around a shared conviction: that furniture should reflect individual aspirations through quality that actually sustains daily life over time. That founding discipline — precision joinery, ethically sourced materials, craftsmanship that shows in the detail — has carried through to the current collection unchanged in principle. Nearly fifty years of consistent standards is what earns the right to be called a reference point. M&O is right to name it as one of the things the industry needs more of.
3. Elevation: engineering in service of the person
Elevation, in M&O’s framing, is about moving beyond pure functionality to restore meaning and feeling to everyday spaces. It is the pillar that sits closest to where Domicil’s design thinking begins.
The approach has always been to start with the body: seat depth, back angle, armrest height, suspension tension. These decisions are made in relation to how a person actually sits, rests, and moves through a day, before any aesthetic choices are resolved. The result is a piece that feels right in a way that is difficult to articulate but immediately apparent. That quality — functional precision producing something that reads as warmth — is what Elevation is describing. The difference is in the direction of travel. Domicil arrives there through the engineering rather than reaching for it through styling.
4. Intensity: what leather and recline actually feel like
Intensity is the most sensory of the four pillars, design that is more directly felt and physically experienced rather than observed across a room. It is also where Domicil’s leather collection and recliner range come into clearest focus.
Leather sourced from South American cattle breeders and taken through more than 30 tanning stages is a material with a genuine arc to it. It changes with use, develops a patina, and becomes more particular to the person living with it over time. A recliner that shifts the body into a near-horizontal position and adjusts back and leg positions independently is a piece that is operated as much as it is sat in. Both of these are intensity in M&O’s sense: immediate, physical, and entirely personal to the person using them. There is nothing abstract about either experience.
The four pillars of “Pulse in Motion” describe a direction the design industry is moving toward. They also describe, with reasonable accuracy, a set of values Domicil has been working through for close to fifty years. This conversation at M&O 2026 might be new, but the thinking behind it, for us, is not.
Explore the Domicil Thinking through our products at https://domicil.global
