Modern Residential Furniture as Cultural Heritage: Designer-Client Collaboration, Bediz Koz, and Butik A across Time

As an element of cultural heritage, modern furniture can be understood simultaneously as a design artifact, a functional object, and a material expression of shared values and everyday life. Designing residential furniture requires designer-client collaboration, blending designers’ expertise with the unique insights of their users. In this context, this study investigates this collaboration, focusing on a specific case: Butik A, a modernist Ankara-based interior architecture company and special driving force behind the company; Bediz Koz. Through archival studies, literature review, as well as oral history methods with the designers’ clients, project cases are presented with briefs ranging from single furniture pieces to complete house projects, approaches that are specific to the clients’ needs, and interpretations of the modernist style. This paper aims to examine clients’ experiences and their roles in shaping furniture and interior architecture in Türkiye. Within this framework, oral history has yielded detailed accounts of the company, with a particular focus on Bediz Koz, while clients’ narratives both intersect with and enrich her statements, producing a more nuanced and interconnected understanding of the design process. Due to the limited number of studies on client views in design history, this study adopts a unique approach, by focusing on clients’ views to present a more democratic understanding of design. In this way, the study contributes to design history in Türkiye and assessing global influences through the lens of modernism.