“Chairs are architecture, sofas are bourgeois,” the Swiss French architect Le Corbusier reportedly once said. A forefather of the clean-lined Modernism that defined European architecture in the decades following the First World War, he shunned decoration in favour of spare and functional forms, famously proclaiming that “a house is a machine for living in.”

If sofas were extraneous to him when compared with beds and chairs, it says a lot about 20th-century domestic life that one of his most enduring creations was a couch: the leather-cushioned Grand Confort Grand Modèle, which he conceived with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret and the French designer Charlotte Perriand in 1928. Versions of the piece, later known as the LC3, have been in production on and off ever since.