When thinking about the backstage area at Coachella, one often imagines a succession of private tents and luxury hospitality spaces. For his return as a headliner in 2026, one of the most anticipated and viral of the festival, Justin Bieber transformed that idea into something much closer to a design installation, placing the Dune at the center of his compound: the celebrated modular sofa designed by Pierre Paulin in 1970. For the SKYLRK space in the Californian desert, the French studio Paulin, Paulin, Paulin created a custom scenography built around this iconic piece of radical design.
More than a simple piece of furniture, the Dune appears as a modular landscape designed to move beyond the traditional idea of the living room. Its soft forms allow people to lie down, sit, or move freely through the space, turning the sofa into a collective and fluid environment. It is a vision perfectly in line with Pierre Paulin’s “utopian” philosophy, which in the 1970s imagined interiors far removed from the rigidity of domestic design at the time.
It was precisely this radicality that made the project too extreme for the industrial production of its time. In fact, the Dune was never commercialized during the designer’s lifetime, remaining for years a concept preserved in the family archives. Today, the family studio Paulin, Paulin, Paulin is bringing it back to life through first editions produced in extremely limited quantities.
For Bieber’s backstage, the modules were reinterpreted in custom colorways designed to dialogue with Coachella’s desert atmosphere. The result was an immersive lounge attended by numerous celebrities and conceived as a decompression zone in the middle of the festival.
The installation also speaks to the return of historical design within contemporary pop culture. In recent years, celebrities like Bieber have begun treating furniture design with the same attention usually reserved for fashion or contemporary art, transforming archival pieces into true cultural symbols. With this collaboration, the Coachella 2026 backstage became a meeting point between music, celebrity culture, and radical French design, once again proving how far ahead of their time some of Pierre Paulin’s intuitions really were.
