If you’re living with a disability, small design choices can make a big difference to your quality of life. High bathroom consoles make it hard to wash your hands from a wheelchair; low sofas are hard to get out of when you have a knee condition.
Today, Pottery Barn is launching a furniture collection designed to be accessible to the elderly, the injured, and those living with disabilities, making it one of the first large home brands to do so. In consultation with experts, the company’s designers adapted 150 best-selling styles—from dining tables to office desks—to accommodate a range of disabilities.
Pottery Barn’s Accessible Home line gives consumers more options for furniture that is both functional and stylish. And as a major retailer—whose parent company, Williams-Sonoma, generated $8.2 billion in 2021—this initiative may signal to the rest of the industry that it makes good business sense to design more inclusively.
Benson tasked Pottery Barn’s designers with creating modified versions of some of the brand’s most popular products to make them safer and easier for people with disabilities to use. To guide them, she brought in experts from the Disability Education and Advocacy Network, which is led by people with disabilities, as well as designers who specialize in designing for disability.
Cini and the Pottery Barn team used the Werner House to help create the Accessible Home line. “We looked at all the current Pottery Barn products and determined what was most appropriate for the Werner House, but we also identified gaps in the market,” Cini said via email.
Benson believes this collection will be good for business. She points out that Pottery Barn reaches a broad swath of consumers, including people choosing to age in place, and they may want to renovate their homes with products from this collection.
But Hamraie points out that Pottery Barn creates high-end products that will likely be out of reach for many people with disabilities, who tend to have lower incomes. “Using the market as a solution can be fraught because many disabled people have income restrictions, so the ability to access a middle-class amenity can be a barrier,” they say. And while it is valuable to focus on the needs of the elderly, Hamraie says it is, in some ways, a luxury to grow old. “Not everyone gets to live into old age,” they say. “There are social determinants, like demographics and access to health insurance, which dictate who dies young.”
Still, Pottery Barn’s collection could send a signal to the market that there’s money to be made in serving the needs of disabled consumers and creating products that will allow homes to be more inclusive of people with disabilities. Ultimately, a line like this could nudge mass-market retailers like Target, Amazon, or Walmart to create stylish, accessible home goods.
Benson admits that developing this collection required a lot of research and learning for the Pottery Barn team; but ultimately, it’s just the beginning. Going forward, designers will be focused on adapting products from each season to the needs of people with disabilities. “We want to keep building partnerships with people in this community,” she says. “We’re approaching this with a fair amount of humility, and we’re eager to keep learning.”
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