How King Living Became a Global Design Brand on Its Own Terms

From Australia to the world, King Living has spent five decades building a legacy grounded in thoughtful design, engineering and enduring craftsmanship.

“From the beginning, we didn’t follow the traditional ways of making furniture. We did things our way, which was different. Those points of difference are still applied today.”

Decades after the first King Living sofa left the workshop floor, founder David King’s words continue to capture the thinking behind the brand. When he established King Living in Sydney in 1977, he brought a willingness to question conventional furniture construction and explore how it could shape the way a piece looked, felt and performed.

That curiosity became the foundation for a design philosophy that has continued to evolve across five decades. Furniture was considered in relation to comfort, construction and everyday life, with engineering forming part of the design process from the outset.

Today, that same way of thinking continues through King Living’s in-house design team, led by Head of Design Chris Cooke.

The connection between David King’s original approach and the work of Chris Cooke and the design team today lies in the same willingness to keep questioning how furniture can work better.

The materials, technologies and ways people live have changed considerably since 1977. The design culture established by David King has evolved alongside them, with the team continuing to consider how furniture can respond to contemporary life while remaining grounded in the principles that first shaped the company.

That evolution can be seen in the way King Living develops its collections. Designers, engineers and product specialists work together from the earliest stages, bringing different forms of expertise into the same conversation. Design is therefore considered not simply as outward form, but in relation to how a piece is constructed, how it supports the body, how it adapts to different spaces and how it will continue to serve its purpose over time.

For King Living, structure, engineering, comfort, adaptability and outward form are considered together from the outset. What happens beneath the surface informs the experience of the finished piece, allowing engineering and design to develop as part of the same process.

The King Steel Frame and Postureflex Seating System offer tangible examples of this thinking. Rather than treating engineering as a separate layer added after the design is established, these elements form part of the way King Living considers the furniture from its earliest stages.

This approach also gives the design team room to evolve its work as materials, technology and lifestyles change. The result is furniture shaped by an understanding of both what people see and what they experience when they live with it.

That relationship continues through King Living’s vertically integrated model. Because the company designs, manufactures and retails its own furniture, the disciplines involved in creating a collection remain closely connected.

Designers can draw on manufacturing expertise, engineers can work alongside the design process, and insight from customers can feed back into how furniture is refined. Each discipline therefore informs the next, creating a continuous exchange between designing, making and living.

For King Living, this connection is part of the design process itself. It allows the team to develop and refine furniture with a direct understanding of how an idea will be produced and, ultimately, experienced in the home.

Jasper offers one example of how this philosophy translates into furniture.

Its modular approach allows it to respond to different spaces and changing needs, reflecting King Living’s wider interest in adaptability. The significance lies less in the individual configurations than in the idea behind them: furniture can evolve alongside the people and spaces around it.

That principle has become increasingly relevant as the way people live continues to change. Homes shift, spaces serve multiple purposes and lifestyles rarely remain fixed, making adaptability an important part of how furniture can remain useful over time.

From its Sydney beginnings, King Living has grown into a global design brand with a presence across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, China, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. The significance of that international presence lies in how the philosophy established in Australia continues to translate across different ways of living.

Homes differ in scale, architecture and lifestyle, and the way people use their living spaces varies from one market to another. The fundamental needs that furniture responds to remain familiar: comfort, functionality, adaptability and longevity.

This gives King Living’s design philosophy a relevance beyond its original setting. The furniture can respond to different spaces and lifestyles while remaining grounded in the same understanding of how people live with it.

In this sense, the global story is also one of continued evolution. As King Living has entered different markets, the design philosophy established in Sydney has had to respond to new environments and ways of living, while retaining the principles that have shaped it since 1977.

King Trade extends King Living’s design, material and specification expertise into the professional design community, bringing the knowledge behind its furniture to architects, interior designers and commercial partners.

It forms a natural extension of a design process in which materials, engineering, construction and the experience of living with furniture have always remained closely connected.

Across five decades, King Living has grown from its Sydney beginnings to an international presence, while the thinking established in 1977 continues to provide its foundation.

The furniture has evolved, engineering has developed and the ways people live have changed. What connects those chapters is a human-centred approach to design: considering engineering alongside form, understanding what happens beneath the surface, allowing furniture to adapt as life changes and keeping the experience of living at the centre of the process.

From David King’s willingness to question conventional furniture construction in 1977 to Chris Cooke and the in-house design team continuing that work today, King Living’s story is one of an Australian design philosophy that has evolved with its time and travelled across different ways of living.

Five decades on, that philosophy continues to shape how King Living designs, engineers and makes its furniture, with the same underlying aim of enhancing the way people live.