Disney taps Gustaf Westman for Mickey Mouse sofa priced at €9,250

Swedish designer Gustaf Westman has turned Mickey Mouse into a black leather sofa that will retail for €9,250, in a collaboration with Disney launching at a Paris pop-up on 30 October.

The made-to-order sofa is one of the first three pieces in the Disney x Gustaf Westman collection, alongside a ceramic cup and a tumbler. Disney announced the items ahead of a wider product collaboration inspired by its Mickey & Friends brand.

All three pieces take an abstract approach to the recognisable character. They focus on Mickey's ears and face, plus his red shorts with white buttons, which Westman turned into the base of the tumbler.

What's in the first drop?

• A leather Mickey Mouse sofa, priced at €9,250, part of a made-to-order furniture collection.
• An all-black ceramic Mickey Mouse cup with a sculptural feel.
• A tumbler based on Westman's existing Chunky Tumbler, restyled in Mickey's colour palette.

The sofa and cup are black and abstract; the tumbler is literal and bright. That split runs through the project.

Why Disney picked Westman

Westman is known for rounded, colourful designs with cartoon-like inflated shapes, spanning crockery to furniture. He says that vocabulary matched the characters from the outset.

"Collaborating with Disney felt like a very natural creative match from the start – when it came to sketching ideas and exploring how a silhouette or colour of a character could meet my own design language, there was so much overlap between these recognisable silhouettes and my signature work," Westman said.

"There's so much joy and playfulness associated with these characters, and I wanted to capture some of that feeling in every piece," he added.

His favourite is the tumbler. "The Mickey Tumbler is probably my favourite piece," Westman said. "You can look at it for one second and totally understand it."

"You see both my world and how I have taken inspiration from Mickey's world at the same time, and that simplicity is something I'm always trying to achieve," he continued.

What does this change for the collection?

The full range won't stop at furniture and homeware. It will also include apparel and accessories, revealed at pop-up stores in Tokyo, New York and Paris, with Paris going first on 30 October before the collection travels on.

Disney, founded as an animation studio in 1923, has a long record of handing Mickey to designers. Interior designer Kelly Hoppen reimagined the character for a "grown-up" audience, and Ron Arad has decorated chairs with Mickey's oversized ears. Westman's €9,250 sofa now sits at the top of that lineage — and sets the price point the rest of the collection will be measured against.

By Grace Kim