The sofa was my first design in collaboration with Salvador Dalí. Originally, the sofa – large, fluffy lips to sit on – was conceived to form part of the volumetric composition of the Sala Mae West at the Theatro-Museo Salvador Dalí in Figueres.

The development of the sofa – like that of the entire room – was an unforgettable experience. From the outset, Salvador and I agreed that it should not have a base platform (such as the one in the painting or the one he made with Jean Michel Frank). Instead, it had to be ultra-realistic lips. With this in mind, Joaquim Camps and I created a 1/5 scale plaster model. When I took it to the Master in Port Lligat, he loved it and asked me to leave it with him for a few days. The following week, Dalí returned it to me, delighted: he had painted, with his characteristic attention to detail, his signature in false bas-relief, like a wound from which a large drop of blood oozed, with a reflective point (the model, which is essentially the original of the piece from which the matrix was taken, is still preserved intact in my Foundation).

Initially, we thought about the possibility of mass production. Dalí was excited about the hyper-realistic detail that could be achieved using polyurethane injection, but after several attempts, we found that the technology for this material was not sufficiently developed to produce such large pieces with the quality and durability we required, so we had to abandon the idea of series production.

It was in 2004 when BD Barcelona Design solved the problem by using the then-novel technique of rotational molding.