The idea for Muuto’s Dream View Bench began at the beach. Danish designer Lise Vester laid down in the sand and traced the natural curve of her own resting body, then translated that outline into foam blocks and began testing the shape with other people, adjusting until she found a position that felt right across a range of heights and builds. The result, now available through Muuto, is a brushed steel bench that points you at the sky.
Lise first mapped the bench’s curve by tracing her own resting posture in the sand, then spent a year concept developing and prototypeing the shape through physical testing with people of different heights and builds.
Lise’s path to the bench runs through a Danish hospice she first visited as a teenager, a place with personal significance to her. That experience changed how she thought about what design could do. “Later, I returned to that hospice as a student for one of my first design projects,” she says. “I interviewed nurses, the palliative care team, and families to understand what made that environment so healing. My dream is that the empathy and beauty found in palliative care settings can be woven into homes, workplaces, cities, into the everyday fabric of life, so that design quietly, but powerfully, supports us wherever we are.”
The concept for the Dream View Bench took shape during her graduate studies at the Royal College of Art in London, where the pandemic had just begun.
“I had just moved to London when COVID hit,” she says. “That time brought up a lot—stress, isolation, and mental health challenges across society. I realized how design could nudge behavior and help us see things differently.” The bench became her answer to that moment, a piece of furniture that makes space for reflection by changing one simple thing: the direction of your gaze.
“I was thinking a lot about how we spend our days in autopilot, always on, always forward,” she says. “Dream View is a deliberate interruption to that rhythm.”
The bench’s brushed steel surface was chosen for its ability to softly reflect the colors of the sky and surroundings, bringing a sense of openness into the object.
The material proved as important as the form. Brushed steel was chosen not just for durability but for its atmospheric qualities.
“It softly reflects the sky and the colors of its surroundings, almost bringing the sky closer to us,” she says. The bench’s curves are bent by machine, the sides laser-cut for accuracy, and the three parts are then welded and finished by hand in Denmark, where Lise found blacksmiths willing to take on the project from the very beginning. After two years of development with Muuto, it moved into larger-scale production with a Danish manufacturer capable of maintaining that level of craft at greater volumes.
The bench can be experienced as part of a permanent installation in the garden of Designmuseum Denmark in Copenhagen, a space that historically served as a hospital, where the garden was part of patients’ recovery. It has since found its way into Copenhagen Airport, offering travelers a moment to pause between destinations. But Lise also imagines it in private gardens, terraces, and interiors with an interesting ceiling or view, anywhere a room could use a quiet place to stop.
“We spend so much of our time moving forward, looking at screens, and being productive,” she says. “This bench proposes another direction, physically and mentally. It invites the body to lean back, the gaze to move upward, and the mind to pause.”
