The furniture company born from a design collective is launching in the United States with three pieces meant to accentuate a residential or office lounge area. The years-long work of a multidisciplinary design group has culminated in the formation of Stereo Furniture and its recent U.S. launch with three distinctive pieces: a pill lounge, square chair and sectional sofa.
The company’s founding team includes a pair of brothers, one of their grad-school classmates, and a business mind. They’re aiming to deliver “premium, mid-tier” furniture with timeless designs that pay homage to early-20th century concepts, naming Eames, Bauhaus and constructivist work among their inspirations.
Stereo was featured in the Wanted Design exhibition at the ICFF (International Contemporary Furniture Fair) in New York City in May of 2026, where it was named an ICFF Launch Pad emerging studio.
Co-founders Matt and Mike Daines worked in graphic design in Los Angeles earlier in their careers before pursuing graduate studies. Matt went to architecture school while Mike attended Cranbrook Academy of Art for his MFA. Though it wasn’t their primary area of focus, the two developed a passion for furniture during this time.
“I think most architects always have at least three or four furniture ideas in the back of their mind,” Matt said. “It’s just something that architects think about.”
While in architecture school at SCI Arc in LA, Matt met and became fast friends with Brandon Broadstone. The two would go on to start their own office in 2016. Along with Mike, they were part of a multidisciplinary design group that included architects, brand designers and graphic artists who were informally sharing ideas for different furniture concepts before eventually deciding to found Stereo.
“We kind of grew up thinking that there’s more to design than just architecture,” Broadstone said. “We’ve focused on how we can broaden our range. Design is kind of everywhere. We gravitated to a lot of areas, and furniture was something we were very passionate about.”
As the furniture ideas grew to a critical mass, they decided to begin prototyping and get serious about starting a company. They employed a non-hierarchical team structure and also wanted to address a glaring lack of focus on individual pieces in furniture design. “The culture of furniture design and interior design had really moved into this kind of ethos of designing environments rather than the idea of the piece as being the problem,” Mike Daines said.
The Stereo design and product leaders felt a return to older concepts, with a modern touch, could bring a more inspired look to homes and offices while also offering modularity and considering sustainability.
“We felt that there were a lot of qualities in early [20th] century furniture design, where the piece was really the problem, and not so much thought was about the total environment,” Mike Daines shared. “If you can really take on the single piece or the single object…it becomes an active character in its environment.”
Their team structure and decision-making process are not common in groups born from more corporate environments.
“It’s refreshing in the sense that I think in a lot of other organizations, you have a lot of overlap with people feeling like they’re maybe stepping on toes…one of the things that we’re really good at, at least from a leadership perspective, is being able to be like that’s not my lane, you make the decisions about what that needs to look like,” said Jenn Diehl, director of strategy.
The Pill lounge consists of a metal frame with three pill cushions. Daines and Broadstone shared that this was one of their favorite design concepts in the early stages, but they were not sure it would work and thought others existed. They added that the most time-consuming design components were the Pill cushion itself, including how sturdy to make it, balancing comfort with durability.
“We were most interested in this kind of early century idea of the frame and the cushion being a kind of separate thing,” Mike Daines said. “The Pill lounge acts as a nest-type frame. All of the cushions can be taken out and are almost separate.”
The Sectional is meant to be a practical, but still sizeable option for studios and urban offices, while the Square chair is an accent chair with a metal frame, similar to the Pill lounge, and inserted cushions.
“So many sectionals now are just so gigantic,” Mike Daines said. “We want it to become a sectional that actually has a legitimate kind of scale to it that isn’t just like so bulky and so big.”
The three items in Stereo Furniture’s launch were not designed together, but they share a common DNA: the design process of a multidisciplinary team; an appreciation for certain concepts; and a desire to deliver a unique, modern flair. They also worked with Danish textile company Kvadrat to source sustainable, durable fabric for this line.
“The Sectional works in that same sense (as the Pill lounge), at least conceptually, where we basically have a box frame for it, and the cushions sit within the box frame…it’s almost like the frame and the seating, or the frame and the cushion have a kind of relationship with each other, but act almost separately from each other in a way that’s a kind of a common theme amongst the three,” Mike Daines shared.
The team credits its design process and overlapping creative skillsets within leadership for their early success and accolades.
“Our design instincts are based on what we like about furniture and what we like to build,” Broadstone said. “It has its own inherent style, because it’s us, but that wasn’t an end goal. We weren’t trying to get to a certain look. We were just trying to make pieces that held the room and hit that void that we’ve been talking about.”