From the Porch to the World.

KIDA arrived as a gesture. With its wrapped aluminum frame and cradle-like organic form, Stephen Burks Man Made created a collection as delightful to behold as to sit in — open, airy, and unmistakably inviting. Since its introduction, KIDA has furnished terraces, gardens, poolsides, and porches around the world, its character rooted in the idea that outdoor furniture should feel like a place you want to return to.

KIDA Porch deepens that gesture. Presented first at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale — where it furnished the PORCH of the US Pavilion as part of the curatorial exhibition “Objects of Belonging” — the collection now enters the permanent DEDON portfolio. What was conceived as a bespoke interpretation has become a new permanent expression: a sophisticated layered cushion system that gives KIDA an entirely new silhouette, even more enveloping, more cocooning, more alive with craft.

Stephen Burks and Malika Leipers’ starting point was not a shape but a cultural memory — the porch as the quintessential site of American rest, community, and intimacy. In the words of Bell Hooks: “The porch swing was a place where intimacies could be forged.” That understanding of the porch as a liminal space — between the domestic and the social, between shelter and the open air — is embedded in every decision the design makes.

The quilting tradition of Gee’s Bend provided the visual and material language. Working in a hands-on workshop in Milan, the studio spent several days selecting, layering, and composing panels of DEDON fabric — exploring how color, tone, and proportion could be combined into compositions as direct and as emotionally resonant as the quilts that inspired them. The result is upholstery that reads as craft: something clearly made, clearly considered, clearly alive with the intelligence of the hand.