SOM launches its first-ever line of urban furniture

Italian manufacturer Neri has launched the first collection of urban furniture designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). The Nebula furniture collection is a family of complementary outdoor products that bring a casual sophistication to city streetscapes, to fill a need for high-design street furniture versatile enough to enhance both vibrant main streets and historic urban corridors.

The Nebula collection continues a collaboration between SOM and Neri, a family-owned company that has been producing furniture and lighting products in Italy since 1962. In 2019, SOM partnered with Neri to develop the Nebula outdoor lighting system, distinguished by its modular and minimalist design. The new furniture collection extends these design principles to a cohesive collection of contemporary products for urban environments.

The new collection includes bench seating, stools, tables, a bicycle rack, litter bins, and planters, each of which is available in various sizes and configurations. Conceived as a collection that can be deployed in a variety of configurations, the products can be arranged to create intimate, inviting, human-scaled settings—places for gathering, conversation, and repose—while also scaling seamlessly for large urban streetscapes.

“This is a collection born of necessity,” explains Carlos Madrid III, Senior Associate Principal at SOM, who led the design of this collection. “Our firm has a long history of working at the urban scale, and we have consistently found a dearth of products in the marketplace that are flexible enough to work at the scale of the conversation, as well as the scale of the city. This collection is designed to be compelling in various configurations and across many types of usage.”

Fabricated in Italy, each piece is crafted in steel with a powder-coated finish in Neri’s signature gray, with custom colors available. The seating uses a durable wood-plastic composite made from 100% recycled materials, earning the ReMade in Italy product certification.

Designing this urban furniture collection is a natural extension of SOM’s practice, rooted in a longstanding commitment to enhancing the public realm. Since its founding in 1936, SOM has designed and planned significant urban developments and public spaces around the world, including London’s Canary Wharf, Chicago’s Millennium Park, and Detroit’s East Riverfront.