While the seats were surely ogled by visiting dignitaries, the series-known to most as Élysée-didn’t gain a cult following until the early 2000s, when it reemerged at New York gallery Demisch Danant. In Paulin’s out-of-this-world rooms, there were several showstoppers: sculptural sofas and chairs molded from strips of wood wrapped in foam and upholstered in leather. In the late 1960s, as France endeavored to jump-start the nation’s suffering design industry, they had a clever idea: a buzzy redo of president Georges Pompidou’s Élysée Palace apartment by the young French talent Pierre Paulin. You can buy them new via Arflex, from $8,150, or hunt down a secondhand score from 1stDibs for a little less, if you’re lucky.

Starchitect Frank Gehry lives with several pieces in his Santa Monica home, and AD100 talent Charles de Lisle used a handful of green ones in his Sea Ranch Lodge redo in California. Today, as the vogue for modular ’70s seating surges, design people across the globe have declared their allegiance. The modular seats, sofas, and beds-which looked like building blocks wearing puffer coats-were officially unveiled in 1971 with Italian manufacturer Arflex (they still produce Strips today, from $8,150 for a sofa).

The so-called Strips series, a name derived from that easy-to-undress design, was practical as ever: “The shell can be slipped off, washed, changed, put back on, and zipped up like a dress over a polyurethane body,” she wrote in 1974. In 1968, Italian architect Cini Boeri began experimenting with simple molded-polyurethane forms that could be wrapped in removable quilts, almost like her children’s sleeping bags. Still in production, Gufram now offers the perch in a range of colors, including one variation with a lip ring! Working with Gufram, the foam furniture innovator du jour, Audrito realized the now-iconic cartoonish sofa called Marilyn (it now goes by Bocca), as an homage to both the crimson-mouthed starlet and the gym’s lipstick-loving owner, Marilyn Garosci. Several iterations of this idea were made in the 1930s, all with slight variations, and all served as inspiration, decades later in 1970, to Italian designer Franco Audrito of Studio 65 who had just been commissioned to design a fitness center in Milan. As Dalí worked on a few for James, across the channel, Paris decorator Jean-Michel Frank was making his own riff-a lips-shaped sofa for the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli. It starts with a 1935 watercolor by Salvador Dalí in which the surrealist artist portrayed the actress Mae West with a sofa for a mouth-a furnishing so provocative that British arts patron Edward James requested one. These days it’s become a sort of poster child for the Blob Sofa trend. Production stopped in 1979, but as the couch steadily climbed to superstar status in recent years (vintage ones appeared in homes of Beastie Boy Mike D, Athena Calderone, and Chrissy Teigen) B&B Italia decided to put it back into production using only recycled or recyclable materials. In an interview with AD last year, he revealed that to come up with Camaleonda he “Crossed two words: Camaleonte, or chameleon, an extraordinary animal capable of adapting to its environment, and onda, or wave.” The invented word captured the endlessly adaptable nature of the sofa system he designed for B&B Italia in 1970, in which bulbous modules of fabric-covered polyurethane hook together using simple, integrated carabiners to create endless configurations, from sectionals and armchairs to ottomans and daybeds.

However, it’s worth committing this piece’s proper name to memory (after all, Bellini designed other sofas). This one is often nicknamed the “Bellini Sofa,” after its Italian creator, Mario Bellini.

Double sided settee