From the Driver’s Seat
to the Living Room
GS01 Chair is the first chair design by Giovanni Shin who had worked in automotive industry as a car designer for over two decades, mostly at GM, Detroit Michigan.
Two Spaces, One Emotional Territory
Furniture and automobiles occupy opposite ends of our daily geography — one anchors us at home, the other carries us through the world beyond it. But the experiences they hold are surprisingly similar. We rest, we think, we watch the world go by. And over time, both begin to collect memory. A conversation held in a living room chair. A landscape passing through a car window on a long drive. The object stops being just an object and becomes part of how we remember a life. GS01 Chair is designed to live inside that shared emotional territory — a piece of furniture that carries the soul of an automobile.
Retro-Futurism, Rendered in Metal and Hide
GS01 Chair speaks the language of retro-futuristic style. The body is fabricated in precision-machined metal: industrial in materiality, yet sharp, lean, and refined in execution. The chair has the elements which from Car style— a hood-opening detail on the front face, air intakes in seatback top, a automotive grille opening at back side panel, and machine-finished deco detail pattern that speak industrial form language.
Against this hard-edged architecture, warmth enters through contrast. Polished chrome legs — modern in line, classical in spirit — ground the piece with quiet elegance. The seat cushion is upholstered in Italian embossed animal-grain leather, the same material found in premium automotive interiors, bridging both worlds in a single tactile gesture.
The result is a chair that feels at once familiar and entirely unexpected: modern and classical, industrial and refined, nostalgic and forward-looking — all at once.
The Car That Inspired It All
GS01 Chair is inspired by the Hyundai Pony Coupe Concept, designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro in 1974. Though it never reached production, the Pony Coupe remains one of the most visionary concept cars even today — disciplined, forward-thinking, and effortlessly ahead of its time even half a century later. It was this very design that first sparked the ambition to become a car designer, making it the natural and deeply personal starting point for a first venture into furniture.