How the Delta sofa became one of Australia's biggest design success stories

The most famous sofa on the Oprah Winfrey Show, was the one Tom Cruise jumped up and down on while declaring his undying love to Katie Holmes and L. Ron Hubbard. However, Oprah’s second-most famous sofa, was the Delta II, by King Living.

The year was 2005, and the Australian-designed Delta II was selected from a world of sofas to appear on Oprah as part of a makeover of a swanky New York apartment. After going to air, viewers swamped King Living, emailing the company for information about the sofa and where they could buy it. They were out of luck, King Living had no American presence.

The following year, the Delta was the sofa of choice for the 2006 Vanity Fair Oscars’ party, after the organisers spotted it in House & Garden Magazine.

More than 90 pieces – consisting of Delta squares, rectangles and backs – were shipped to Los Angeles. The sofas were assembled as U-shaped settings outside the main room, while the square sections (ottomans) were situated in the centre, clipped together in various formations.

After the party, the sofas were returned to Australia, where King sold them off and donated the proceeds to a children’s charity. In 2007, Vanity Fair purchased the sofas outright to use for future events, including the Cannes Film Festival.

When introduced in 1998, the Delta revolutionised Australian furniture. Its modular steel-framed construction was unlike any we’d ever known, allowing a degree of flexibility that meant it could fit into corners, or expand to fill a room. And with adjustable backrests, it could become a chaise lounge, three-seat armless sofa, or even a queen-size bed.

Created by King Living founder David King at his design studio in Sydney’s Camperdown (since moved to Turrella), the brief was to produce a sofa that would combine unsurpassed adaptability with durability and comfort.

“We started our business selling foam modular sofas at Paddy’s Markets, back in 1977,” says King. “From that we understood the power of flexibility, where people could arrange the furniture in their rooms as they wanted, and if they moved house, they could change the furniture around to suit their new space.”

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King took that same design philosophy and applied it to a contemporary modular sofa with a robust but comfortable steel frame. This was the Delta.

“A lot of people said the Delta solved the problem of flexibility and adaptability that no other furniture had at that time,” King says. “It’s the biggest-selling sofa of its type in Australia, with more than 100,000 sold, and they are now hugely popular in Asia.

Over the next 20 years, the Delta became one of the biggest success stories of Australian design . The original Delta has evolved to become the Delta III, with Smart Pockets, plus optional under-seat storage, integrated LED reading lamp, swivel table and smartphone charge table. An all-weather outdoor version of the Delta also became available in 2015.

The Block’s Neale Whitaker is another big fan. “It’s such a classic piece of Australian designed furniture,” he says. “I’m trying to avoid using cliches, but sometimes when you talk about these things it’s difficult not to use words like timeless and classic, but the Delta is both of those things.

“In this day and age, for a design still to be a best-seller after 20 years is pretty good going,” says Whitaker. “The Delta is now being bought by a completely different generation to the original generation who bought it. That’s pretty damn special.”