After over four years of research and development, Bose has built a speaker collection that looks more like it belongs on a shelf next to a ceramic vase than mounted below a screen.
The group’s Lifestyle Collection, which became available this month, comprises three products: the Lifestyle Ultra Speaker, the Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar, and the Lifestyle Ultra Subwoofer, a modular home audio system that can scale from a single bookshelf speaker all the way up to a full home theater. But the first thing most people will notice about them has nothing to do with sound.
The Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar, which Bose says hadn’t been fundamentally reconsidered as a form in over a decade. The team started from scratch. Photo courtesy of Bose
Each speaker grille is covered in knitted fabric. Knitted, with a texture that reads more like a throw pillow than a piece of consumer electronics. Crystle Mackiewicz, a designer on Bose’s CMF team, describes the material as the result of a process that was as much acoustic as it was aesthetic.
“Fabrics can interfere with sound in very measurable ways,” she says. “Through a continuous dialogue we’ve been able to test different knit structures and yarns to find the right balance between aesthetic and performance.”
That tension ran through the entire design process. The team explored a wide range of directions before landing on the Lifestyle Collection’s final form, from architectural near-monoliths to softer, textile-driven concepts. The throughline was the idea that these products should feel like part of a home’s interior rather than visitors to it.
Though some subwoofers are built to be hidden, Bose designed this one so you wouldn’t have to. Photo courtesy of Bose
“When a speaker sits next to a sofa or a bookshelf, it’s no longer just technology and instead becomes part of the environment,” she says. “The magic in designing home audio for this natural environment is a matter of being sympathetic to what its actual surroundings will be.”
That idea extends to how the products are meant to age. In furniture, wear is usually considered an asset, something that adds character and tells a story. Consumer electronics tend to resist that idea, optimizing for surfaces that stay looking new. Bose pushed in the opposite direction. Their Driftwood Sand model features white oak, a wood traditionally used in high-end furniture that develops a richer patina as it oxidizes and is exposed to light, shifting from a cool, pale brown to a warmer, deeper golden tone over time.
The Lifestyle Ultra Speaker in Driftwood Sand. The white oak trim will deepen in tone as it ages. Photo courtesy of Bose
“With white oak, we are also signaling that these new devices are meant for a long relationship with its user, and their home,” she says. “It reframes the Lifestyle Collection as something that evolves with your home.”
The soundbar also carries a weight in that framing, and arrives with a particular backstory. Crystle tells me the soundbar form hadn’t been meaningfully redesigned in over a decade. When the Bose team finally started on the collection’s soundbar design, they made a deliberate choice: throw out everything that had worked before.
“We deliberately broke the wheel,” she says.
The Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar uses an overhauled internal acoustic architecture that Bose describes as, “the best-sounding soundbar the company has ever made.” The design language was built to match that ambition from the ground up rather than simply refresh what came before.
“When a speaker sits next to a sofa or a bookshelf, it’s no longer just technology and instead becomes part of the environment,” Crystle says. “It’s a matter of being sympathetic to what its actual surroundings will be.”
On the connectivity side, the collection supports Apple AirPlay, Google Cast, Spotify Connect, Bluetooth, and built-in Alexa. An updated Bose app offers guided setup with consolidated permissions, third-party account sign-in, and secure Wi-Fi credential sharing across devices. Once configured, the system can be grouped with compatible speakers from other manufacturers for whole-home audio.
The Lifestyle Ultra Speaker is priced at $299, the Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar at $1,099, and the Lifestyle Ultra Subwoofer at $899.
Available at bose.com
