In conversation with Chapter, Robert Natale, CEO and the creative force behind Sixpenny, discusses what it means to design furniture not for idealized showrooms, but for real living spaces. The American design brand is known for a timeless, calm visual language focused on comfort, everyday practicality, and lived-in rooms. In this interview, Natale reflects on the emotional weight of furniture, personal memories of home, the role of versatility in interior design, and his position between corporate responsibility and creative intuition.
Chapter Sixpenny has a highly refined visual language, yet it never comes across as a showroom brand—it feels made for real homes. What does it mean to you to design luxurious furniture for spaces that are genuinely lived in?
Robert Natale That’s very kind, and it may have to do with the fact that we see ourselves first and foremost as a direct-to-consumer digital-first brand. Our intention, regardless of whether our pieces are bought directly from us or from designers we work with, is for them to be beautiful, comfortable and life-ready.
Chapter When you think about good design, how do you know a piece of furniture is not only beautiful, but truly works in everyday life—and what allows a room to grow more compelling over time, rather than lose its impact?
Robert Natale I don’t think you can truly know until you spend time with it. Beauty can often exist in a vacuum (although obviously context impacts beauty as well), but function in my experience is usually revealed over time. Living with something impactful like furniture is like learning to dance with a new partner—it requires you to slightly reimagine your own patterns. The result or satisfaction is just as much up to you as it is the thing itself.
That said there are some elements that certainly come to mind as being more obviously life-friendly. Our designs are almost all slipcovered, which sounds like an adorable perk at first, and then your dog pees on the cushion and a lightbulb goes on. Being able to change the fabric or color is also a gorgeous option that I think really suits today’s emphasis on constant change and modularity at home.
Layered textures, carefully chosen materials, and thoughtful details define an approach to
modern luxury that creates calm, warm, and grounded interiors.
Chapter What personal experiences and memories of home, living, or certain spaces have shaped your work as a designer?
Robert Natale I was raised by a single mother who … let’s say … »strongly encouraged« a meticulously tidy space. She also had a distinctive style of her own, so the awareness that a home could be more than a roof over your head was instilled in me at a very young age. That later developed into a desire to bring my own creativity to my own spaces—as a teenager I was always rearranging furniture, painting rooms or moldings or doors, collecting shoddy antiques, etc. Ultimately that »what if we try it this way?« curiosity has proven to be an invaluable asset for my work life.
Chapter What have you learned can only be understood through actually living with a piece of furniture—something that is difficult to anticipate or represent during the design process—and how do you respond to those discoveries?
Robert Natale That a significant furniture purchase—such as a sofa—can hold a lot of weight in one’s life. That puts the responsibility as a designer on creating the best marriage of timeless beauty, exceptional comfort, and practical convenience when a product is taken to market.
Chapter When you look at your own home, what is it that makes it feel distinctly yours? And in your view, what is it that makes a home feel truly authentic?
Robert Natale My wife and our dogs. I could live anywhere as long as they’re around. We spend most of our time between China and New York and have collected pieces from our travels that add personality, but really it’s an energy thing. We try to maintain a state of restorative chaos whenever we settle in for the foreseeable months.
When it comes to authenticity, I think it depends on how you mean it. If we care to live as our most unencumbered »true« selves, then anything goes. But I think the holy grail in designing a space or a piece is whether it holds the space for that so-called authentic self—how we’d like to lounge or move about, how we’d like to achieve the balance of our aspired selves via color, texture and shapes that inform the other facets of our identity.
Sixpenny’s first-ever printed sofa from the The Wild Air Collection.
Chapter As both CEO and the creative force behind Sixpenny’s design vision, you inhabit two roles that do not always naturally align. When business logic and design intuition pull in different directions, which voice do you trust first — and how do you bring them back into dialogue?
Robert Natale I feel very fortunate 1. that most of what I want to design aligns with the brand’s business priorities, and 2. that half the fun of design is solving lots of mini »problems« for the business, so we haven’t had a lot of »Sophie’s Choice« moments when it comes to design versus business.
I would say that in a way we don’t feel a sense of complete ownership over our own brand. We are of the mindset that the vision of the brand is shared between us and our customers, and interactions with our customers have provided stewardship for both our design and business instincts. [Ed.]
