If you’ve ever subjected yourself to the spinal trauma of an airport bench, you know there’s nothing worse than ducking under clenched carry-on items while doing the jacket-under-ankle-over-armrest move, knowing full well you’ve got hours to go until your destination finds you.

Heaven armchair. Designed by Tokujin Yoshioka. Manufactured by Cassina.

Unless your destination is Heaven. (Don’t be silly, it won’t kill you to sleep in an airport. In fact, it’s almost a right of passage these days.) But in this case, I am referring to the new armchair, Heaven, by designer Tokujin Yoshioka for Cassina.

With Heaven, Yoshioka's poetics are for the first time concentrated on padding in the classic sense of the term, though endowing it with an allure that is hardly traditional. The irregular contour of the padding and the seemingly accidental folds of the upholstery conceal a manic attention to form that enhances comfort to the maximum. (Press release, 2008.)

Many would say tradition and comfort have little to do with one another. In fact, with the inundation of plastic chairs being produced, they’d claim the stereotypical modern chair rings less cozy than Grandma’s chenille-inspired davenport. But Yoshioka retrofits this notion of modern. The Heaven armchair aligns itself with a fresh approach to furniture design – one Cassina has long been familiar with – through errant fabric creases and copious cushioning.

With Heaven, Cassina once again demonstrates its ability to innovate, through an intimate and ongoing dialogue with visionary designers, who start with the reinterpretation of a form and turn it upside down until it becomes a different form with a new meaning, ready to set the standard in the theatres of modern living.

Yet somehow – after an afternoon spent on a park bench, maybe – Yoshioka makes the irresistable cliche “Heaven on Earth”, possible.