Mark Grattan‘s furniture usually starts somewhere personal. Cosme, his new lounge collection with HBF, started as a residential concept for one of his celebrity interior projects, born out of a simple, stubborn desire to build seating that felt “luxurious for the body.” It didn’t stay residential for long.
What launched at NeoCon 2026 is a four-piece collection engineered to hold up in lobbies, private clubs, and executive suites without losing the softness that got it there in the first place.
A contrasting back pillow lets designers turn Cosme’s architectural edge up or down depending on the room it’s landing in.
Mark is a Hudson, Ohio, native who trained at Pratt and has spent the years since moving between New York, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City, absorbing tropical modernism, contemporary Italian design, and Art Deco along the way. He won HBO Max’s Ellen’s Next Great Designer, landed pieces in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Smithsonian, and has spent his career pushing for more recognition of Black creatives in a design world that hasn’t always made room. He was also featured in Sixtysix’s In Conversation last fall.
Cosme is his first venture into commercial furniture, a different discipline entirely from the one-off residential work that built his name.
“It’s a different language altogether,” Mark says. “There’s so much more you have to consider.” Part of that, he explains, is designing for people he’ll never meet, rather than a single client with a specific room in mind. “Designing for a general audience is so important.”
A new seam treatment, developed alongside HBF’s product team, draws a crisp line between upholstery and structure.
Mark’s practice has never been confined to furniture. He paints, sculpts, and works in fiber art alongside his design projects, and that instinct for color and material shows up in how he talks about his own process. It’s the same instinct that shaped Layered, his debut fabric collection with HBF Textiles, and it carries into how he approached Cosme, even though the final collection is furniture rather than textile.
“For a while now, everything has become a little more beautiful, simpler language for me,” Mark says. “I’m trying to collect something a little more refined, and a little more structured.”
One-seat, two-seat, three-seat, ottoman: Cosme scales up without losing the proportions that made the original idea work in a living room.
Cosme’s most distinctive feature came out of that tension between structure and comfort. The collection is built around a rounded column leg, available in wood veneer, marble, solid surface, or upholstered leather, that softens the architectural geometry of the piece around it. In wood, the veneer is laid at a deliberate 45 degree angle, a small detail meant to catch movement and craftsmanship in the leg itself rather than treating it as a straight structural afterthought. Marble does something similar through natural variation instead of an engineered angle.
The rounded column leg is where Cosme’s whole argument lives, structure softened just enough to still feel like furniture you’d want to sink into.
“I wanted the collection to feel architectural and confident, but also deeply comfortable and tactile,” he says. “Working directly with HBF’s team and prototyping in real time allowed us to refine every proportion and detail until the collection felt exactly right, not just visually, but physically.”
Built for the long haul, Cosme skips PFAS, PVC, and antimicrobial treatments, with a replaceable back pillow designed to outlast a single upholstery cycle.
