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Trade terms for professionals and design studios
In May 2025, during Clerkenwell Design Week, Sedus opened its London showroom at 9 Brewhouse Yard to present the Work Café, a concept built on three words, Work, Learn, Create, and on one sentence from its marketing director Ernst Holzapfel: freedom in the workplace no longer just means which desk you choose, it now means how you use the whole working environment. The seating that furnishes that idea is se:café, and it was on the floor in Clerkenwell.
Three lines make up the family. Falk Blümler drew the upholstered part: the se:café soft chair with a 445 mm (17½ in) seat, a lower and wider lounge chair, and a stool in two heights. Konstantin Thomas signed the bench without a back, the high bench and the diner with its own table, plus the wooden chair in solid beech or ash, which won a Red Dot and an iF award in 2025. In a British office the same pieces work as reception seating next to the front desk and as the furniture of the break area, which is exactly what the London showroom was showing.
Read by zone, the range sorts itself: tables get the soft chair or the wooden chair, corners get the two lounge versions, the counter gets stool and high bench at 625 or 780 mm (24⅝ or 30¾ in), which are bar stool heights, and the diner brings a 1,400 × 700 mm (55⅛ × 27½ in) table that can be wired. La Mercanti draws the zones with the client first and writes the order list afterwards, one height per zone.
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They are the four wooden chairs of the family, as listed on the TÜV Rheinland certificate. cw-223 is the table-height chair with a wooden seat and cw-224 the same chair with Viennese cane; cw-267 and cw-268 are the lounge-height versions, wider and lower, again with a wooden or a caned seat. Each code is then completed by the frame code for beech or ash and its finish.
A stable, semi-transparent plastic mesh stretched underneath the weave. Sedus describes the Viennese cane as thin rattan strips worked into a woven pattern, and the mesh is there precisely to extend its life. The caned version sits on a finger-jointed, glued frame with the legs screwed to it, which is a different substructure from the veneered seat.
Yes, on more than one line. The soft chair, lounge chair and stool can be ordered flame retardant with the cover fabrics One or Step; the cushion of the wooden chair with One, Step or Nobel; the bench line with the fabric Umber. The fabrics are the variable, the padding and the shell stay the same, so the choice is made at the moment the covers are specified.
Sedus publishes the figures in its environmental product information: the soft chair with a wooden frame and Cyber fabric weighs 11.13 kg (24.5 lb) without packaging, the bench with a steel frame 24.21 kg (53.4 lb). In the bench, steel accounts for 9.21 kg and aluminium for 3.46 kg; in the chair the largest single material is polypropylene at 4.22 kg.
Not on the wooden frames. Sedus states that the 4-leg wooden frame of the soft line is not stackable, and the same applies to the se:café wooden chair. The listing does not declare stacking for the steel or skid frames either, so a project that needs chairs put away between uses should be planned around storage space rather than stacks.
A specification for se:café is a list of codes and heights rather than adjectives. Five steps to write it so that the order matches the drawing.
The four solid wood versions of se:café carry their own codes on the GS certificate: cw-223 and cw-224 at table height, cw-267 and cw-268 at lounge height, the even numbers with Viennese cane. Write the code, then the wood (beech or ash) and its finish.
The se:café soft chair is 445 mm (17½ in) high, the stool and the high bench 625 or 780 mm (24⅝ or 30¾ in). Put the figure on the line: two products with the same name and different heights cannot share one specification line.
For the soft line state skid, 4-leg steel or 4-leg wood, then plastic glides for soft floors or felt for hard floors. The bench takes hybrid glides, the wooden chair reversible ones. The frame also fixes the load: 130 kg (287 lb) on steel, 110 kg (243 lb) on wood.
The se:café soft line lets the specifier name three surfaces, the seat and both faces of the back; a bench has an upper and a lower cushion instead. Colours combine within one collection only, so the specification names the collection first and the colours after.
Close the se:café line with the marks the manufacturer declares: GS to DIN EN 16139 L1 and DIN 4573, GREENGUARD UL 2818 for the soft chair and the wooden chair, TÜV harmful-substance testing on the wooden chair. La Mercanti supplies the certificates as downloads from the product page.
