Posted by Janet B. Stroud — November 6, 2024 — Landscape Forms, a leading North American designer and manufacturer of high-design site furniture, structure, lighting and accessories, has just introduced the Booth line of outdoor social seating as well as the Contour line of ADA-compliant public site-grade tables.
Booth
The Booth line of social seating was designed to create interaction spaces that are fresh yet familiar, taking the warmth, comfort and semi-privacy of a widely enjoyed indoor seating experience and reimagining it for the outdoors. It’s a social design, intended to define spaces that bring people together and encourage closeness and quality conversation.
The Booth line of social seating takes the warmth, comfort and semi-privacy of a widely enjoyed indoor seating experience and reimagines it for the outdoors. Source: Landscape Forms
Landscape Forms Chief Creative Officer Kirt Martin explained:
Booth was inspired by our profound need as humans to anchor ourselves in outdoor spaces. We’ve taken the familiar typology of an indoor booth, and brought it outdoors — giving people an intuitive, welcoming and intimate space to come together to work, dine or socialize. It creates a room within a room outdoors, and it’s never been done before this way.
Designed by the Landscape Forms design team, Booth was initially created for internal use on the company’s own campus. Following much positive reception and an unmet need for this type of seating solution voiced by its customers, Landscape Forms is introducing Booth as a widely available standard product. The Booth line includes two silhouettes — a tall-back booth and a low-back booth — designed to meet face-to-face in pairs.
Booth’s rounded corners and softened edges create a comfortable character, and hooks on both sides provide convenient storage for bags and coats. Source: Landscape Forms
Two booths fit tightly together when arranged back-to-back, enabling space-efficient groupings for generous outdoor seating and dining space. Further, an Outdoor Booth can also stand alone as an architectural bench, as an accessible one-sided booth, or against a wall as modern banquette-style seating. Booths pair ideally with a range of Landscape Forms’ tables, including the new Contour line, to create elegant and cohesive outdoor social settings.
Booth’s rounded corners and softened edges create a comfortable character, while a subtle flare to the form of the seat and metal support structure offers a friendly, inviting gesture. Hooks located on both sides of the booth toward the top of the back provide convenient storage for bags and coats. Both the tall-back and low-back booths feature warm, fillet-edged wood slats for the seat and back, and the design for the tall-back booth includes an additional powdercoated metal portion atop the back to enhance senses of privacy and intimacy.
The booths are offered in a range of Landscape Forms’ sustainable, naturally weathering exterior woods, including a new dassoXTR Fused Bamboo option engineered specifically for use outdoors. Fused bamboo is said to be incredibly stable and durable, elegantly dark in color, and sustainable, with very low environmental impact.
Versatility in arrangement coupled with Booth’s distinct design focus on balancing openness and accessibility with privacy and intimacy creates a new wealth of possibilities in the way people engage with outdoor space. Landscape Forms Director of Design Ryan Heiser remarked:
The obvious use case is outdoor dining, but we see a lot of potential for Outdoor Booth in spaces like corporate and higher education campuses to do much more as well. We’ve had them installed on our campus for a while now, and they’re enjoyed constantly for everything from meetings to small group collaboration to individual work.
Learn more about the Booth line of social seating at Landscape Forms.
Contour
Contour is Landscape Forms’ first collection of high-design, highly durable tables that can comply with existing Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Standards for Accessible Design.
A first in the outdoor site furnishing space, Contour is a system of mutually compatible components that can be combined to create different ADA-compliant tables that address a range of site needs and can appear all throughout a given setting. Source: Landscape Forms
Landscape Forms Director of Design Ryan Heiser explained:
With Contour, we challenged ourselves to design a public site-grade table that’s beautiful, flexible, and also fully ADA compliant. Championing inclusivity and enabling more people to enjoy more outdoor experiences are fundamental to who we are at Landscape Forms, so to achieve this in a way that is also aesthetically inspiring is an especially proud moment for us.
To head the design of Contour, Landscape Forms enlisted the expertise of Ignacio Ciocchini, an award-winning New York City-based industrial designer recognized for his excellence in product design for cities, streetscape design and master-planning with a keen focus on accessibility. Heiser continued:
Between his work with multiple New York City Business Improvement Districts, his transformational restoration of Midtown Manhattan’s Bryant Park, and his dozens and dozens of ADA integrations all across the city, Ignacio Ciocchini was the perfect match for Contour. He knows everything there is to know about ADA compliance and creating enduring beauty in public outdoor space, so his expertise runs throughout every aspect of these tables.
Central to the design of Contour is the idea of achieving true inclusivity, adapting the design to create a universal user experience that is the same for both non-disabled users and users with a disability. Source: Landscape Forms
Designer Ignacio Ciocchini pointed out:
You’ll find a lot of tables claiming to be wheelchair-accessible in the market today but, if you check the specifications, you’ll quickly understand they don’t fully comply with existing ADA regulations. The user experience those products offer people with disabilities is either null, or at the most, very different from the experience they offer people without a visible disability. So, for Contour, we focused relentlessly on understanding this problem and the existing regulations, designing for elegance and simplicity, and importantly, ensuring that the experience must be the same for all users — no shortcuts allowed. This combination led us to create a product line that I believe is one step above any other tables on the market today.
Touted as a first in the outdoor site furnishing space, Contour is a system of mutually compatible components that can be combined to create different ADA compliant tables that address a range of site needs and can appear all throughout a given setting. Central to the design of Contour is the idea of achieving true inclusivity, adapting the design to create a universal user experience that is the same for both non-disabled users and users with a disability.
Heiser added:
When you approach a setting of tables — whether it’s a bistro, a restaurant or a park — what if, instead of having that one ADA accessible table over there in the corner, every table was accessible to everyone? That’s exactly what you can achieve with Contour.
The Contour system includes round, gently rounded square and gently rounded rectangular tabletops, each constructed from powdercoated steel, and each offered in two different sizes. The tables are then completed with a choice of four powdercoated aluminum legs or a surface-mounted pedestal constructed from either high-performance concrete or cast aluminum.
In the four-legged versions, Contour’s surface gently floats over rectangular, pill-shaped legs that protrude slightly from the edge of the table. The legs are positioned at 45-degree angles that flare out toward the user, creating a welcoming gesture, aiding ingress and egress, and lending Contour its unique appearance. In Contour’s surface-mounted pedestal versions, a pill-shaped center column ends in a robust truncated-cone base that creates an elegant transition between table pedestal and paving surface. Throughout Contour’s iterations, the design specifically eliminates under-table obstructions and provides an optimal height, width and depth of knee clearance to ensure all spaces at the table can be ADA compliant.
Learn more about Contour ADA-compliant tables at Landscape Forms.
