From VR to the Stockholm Furniture Fair: Gustav Winsth's Reality Chair

Tools used

A chair born entirely in the digital world

Gustav Winsth is a Stockholm-based furniture designer with a background in mechanical engineering and a design language that draws more from industrial production than from furniture tradition. For the past 5 years, his process has been built around digital tools, using CAD software as a sketching environment rather than an engineering one. Gravity Sketch as a tool removed the ceiling on what Gustav could explore.

Like Gustav’s other projects, the Reality Chair started as exactly that. The purpose of the project was to test how far a fully digital design process could go before it had to meet the physical world. The outcome is a chair designed entirely in VR, validated ergonomically without a single physical prototype, and manufactured in aluminum by craftspeople found specifically because they could work without being constrained by what the standard machinery on the workshop floor can do.

Reimagining collaboration through virtual reality

The project came together when metalworker Alexander Lervik saw a sofa Gustav had designed for Lammhults. This piece was created specifically to demonstrate what VR design could mean for international collaboration and prototyping costs. Alexander recognized what Gustav was trying to say with it and reached out.

Even though they were based only minutes apart in Stockholm, Gustav and Alexander deliberately kept every meeting in Gravity Sketch. The goal wasn’t convenience but to demonstrate that the virtual room could function as a shared workshop for collaborators anywhere in the world. Similarly, the pair wanted to showcase that it is possible to keep the entire process, from first sketch to final prototype, collected and visible in one place.

Getting Alexander into VR for the first time wasn’t frictionless. The first sessions involved 30 minutes of him navigating his way toward Gustav’s sketch while inflating and deflating in the distance, trying to figure out which direction to zoom. Once they found their footing, the collaboration room became exactly what Gustav had hoped: a shared space where Alexander’s physical sketches could be scanned in, placed on a digital table, and built up in 3D while both of them evaluated the results together in real time.

The Reality Chair workflow from sketching to aluminum

Review of manufacturability (Gravity Sketch)

Step 1: Physical sketches into the room. Alexander’s hand sketches were scanned and placed onto the virtual workspace as reference. Gustav built them up in 3D, made several quick iterations, and the pair evaluated each together before deciding which directions to develop further.
Step 2: Rapid iteration in Gravity Sketch. Promising directions were developed through a duplicate-change-duplicate-change loop, with each version remaining visible in the room. The room soon filled with small and large models, each showing a stage in the evolution of the final form.
Step 3: Ergonomic validation at 1:1 scale. Alexander selected an existing armchair for a comfort benchmark and it was imported into the scene as a transparent overlay. By placing it directly on top of the Reality Chair model, Gustav could check seat height, back position, seat depth, and wrist placement without building a physical prototype. Mannequins were also used to validate support positioning throughout.
Step 4: Manufacturing feasibility. Geometry developed freely in Gravity Sketch was brought into SolidWorks to verify producibility, including checking tube lengths, join points, and how components fit together before ordering physical parts. The process moved back and forth between the tools iteratively: Gravity Sketch was used for exploration and SolidWorks for validation.
Step 5: Physical manufacturing and jig-based assembly. Finding craftspeople was no easy feat because the seat couldn’t be manufactured with typical machinery. The seat was CNC milled from an MDF plug, cast into a negative tool, and pressed in a hydraulic press by a metal specialist who usually makes custom motorcycle tanks. In turn, the leg domes were made by a metal turner in Stockholm who specializes in ornaments for church towers. The final step included welding all the different parts together. A custom jig ensured all legs were welded in the exact positions matching the digital model.

"The VR prototyping allowed us to explore and refine the design in ways that would have been nearly impossible otherwise. The result was a chair that not only looked as we had envisioned but also felt as comfortable and ergonomic as we had hoped, without even trying out anything outside of the virtual world."

Gustav Winsth, Designer

Proving that VR-only design can become reality

The most significant challenge in translating the Reality Chair from digital to physical wasn’t the design but finding people capable of making it. Most manufacturers Gustav approached were bound by their machinery or their established processes. The brief required metalworkers who could shape material the way you can shape geometry in Gravity Sketch: freely, starting from nothing, without a standard production workflow to fall back on.

Gustav and Alexander’s search led to a motorcycle tank fabricator, a museum-grade metal turner who works alone in the woods, and a welder willing to take on an aluminum structure that looked, by conventional manufacturing logic, like it had no business existing.

Gustav deliberately didn’t sit in the CNC-milled seat before the chairs were finished. All three of the Reality Chairs produced for the Stockholm Furniture Fair were the first examples of going directly from digital design to physical form with no intermediate prototyping, and he wanted the result to speak for itself – and it did.

The chair was comfortable, the proportions matched the VR design, and Gustav now has the proof of concept he needed to show manufacturers that a workflow built entirely on Gravity Sketch is possible.

"The Reality project went beyond just designing the chair, it was about proving that design tools can be used to evaluate ergonomics and functionality in ways that were previously a time- and resource-consuming process. And the chair stood as a proof of concept that digital design isn't just a trend but a viable effective method for sustainably creating and manufacturing products."

Gustav Winsth, Designer