New first-class seating units can cost more than half a million dollars each. Illustration by Harry Campbell

Seven years ago, I flew business class on Qantas from Australia to California, a thirteen-hour trip. I hadn’t had much experience outside economy, but I didn’t want to look like a front-of-the-plane rookie, so I stowed my “amenity kit” without ripping it open, declined the first cocktail a flight attendant offered me, and tried to appear engrossed in a book while the passenger nearest me bounced around like a four-year-old at a birthday party. I didn’t begin to play with my own seat until after dinner, when I lowered it into its fully extended position, and stretched out—not to sleep, which is something I hardly ever manage on airplanes, but to see how the thing worked. The concave back of the seat shell formed a domed enclosure over my head, like a demi-cocoon. Suddenly, I heard people speaking in loud voices and banging things around. I sat up, indignant—and realized that the noise was the sound of breakfast being served. I’d slept for eight hours straight, something I never do even at home. In a little while, we began our descent into Los Angeles.

In the early nineties, the best seats on airplanes were still just seats, even if they reclined almost all the way back. Then, in 1995, in first class on some long flights, British Airways introduced seats that turned into fully flat beds, and within a relatively short period airborne sleeping became a potent competitive weapon. The carriers that fly the wealthiest passengers on the longest routes have been especially aggressive about adding comforts, in both first and business (while also often shrinking the seats in economy and squeezing them closer together). A first-class passenger on the upper deck of some Lufthansa 747s gets to hop back and forth between a reclining seat and an adjacent full-length bed. On some of Singapore Airlines’ A380s, a couple travelling in first can combine two “suites” to create an enclosed private room with a double bed and sliding doors. On some flights on Emirates, first-class passengers who make a mess of the treats in their personal minibar can tidy up with a shower before they land.

The modern aircraft-seating industry is highly specialized. The number of manufacturers is small, in part because creating new seats is so complex that moving from conception to installation takes years and entails large financial risks. It also poses unique design challenges, since a premium-class seat has to create an impression of opulence in what is actually a noisy and potentially nausea-inducing metal tube filled with strangers. If you checked into a luxury hotel and were taken to a room the size of a first-class airplane cabin, and told that you’d be sharing it with eleven people you didn’t know, all of whom would be sleeping within a few feet of your own skinny bed, you wouldn’t be thrilled, especially if you were paying twenty thousand dollars for the experience. Yet it’s not unheard of for people who travel long distances in really good seats to remember the flight as one of the best parts of their trip. Making them feel that way requires a particular kind of design and engineering skill, along with what amounts, almost, to psychological sleight of hand.

In March, TheDesignAir, an air-travel Web site, published its second annual ranking of the best international business classes. The winning airline was Singapore, and the runner-up was Cathay Pacific, which is based in Hong Kong. One interesting fact about Singapore and Cathay is that they held the same positions on last year’s list, though in the other order. Another is that the business-class seats on both were created by the same design firm: James Park Associates, whose main office occupies three rooms in a building on Worship Street, in Shoreditch, in East London. Just inside the largest room is a worktable surrounded on three sides by IKEA bookcases filled with fabric swatches, carpet samples, and plastic bags containing pajamas, robes, and other “soft goods” that J.P.A. created for first-class cabins on Air China. In the main part of the room, two dozen designers work shoulder-to-shoulder at computers on two long tables.

James Park, the firm’s founder and principal, is sixty-seven years old, and when he’s wearing his glasses he looks a little like the poet Philip Larkin. He earned a degree in architecture in 1974 at London’s Architectural Association, whose other alumni include Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, and Richard Rogers. His first job after graduation was with the Louis de Soissons Partnership, a distinguished architectural practice. When that firm moved out of London, he left and took what he assumed would be a stopgap job: helping to restore and design vintage railway carriages for the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, a luxury private-train service.

“The train project became much more involving and much more enjoyable than I’d thought it would,” Park told me recently, as we sat at a big table in the firm’s conference room. “There was a lot of marquetry and very high-quality finishes in the interiors.” There was also the challenge of fitting things together in a way that would allow the wooden panels to move without splitting or cracking. “That’s a tricky problem, because a train car is moving all the time, and it isn’t a completely rigid object,” he said. “It also contracts and expands—say, as it goes up into the mountains and then comes down to Venice in the summer.”

One of the old train cars was so badly corroded that it couldn’t be salvaged. Park cut it in half, and studied, in cross-section, the way the interior had been assembled—a technique that he and his colleagues adopted, and called “loose-fit technology.” To explain, he took my pen and a piece of scrap paper, and sketched the profile of a train car sliced vertically, across its width: ceiling, frieze, raised panel, heater grille, skirting, floor—all made of wood. The parts fit together in a way that allowed them to move on their anchors, he said, and each panel was secured by a horizontal piece, which was screwed in place. “If you simply removed that one piece, you could dismantle the whole thing, because it was all interlocking,” he said. “All you needed was a screwdriver.”

That train restoration led to others. Then, in the early nineteen-nineties, Singapore Airlines invited J.P.A. to compete for the job of reconceiving the first-class cabins on its Boeing 747s. “They were interested in us because of the trains, because we’d shown we were good at dealing with small spaces,” Park said. He quickly decided that aviation seating had changed little in decades, and that even in first class the ambience was coldly utilitarian. The seats were large, and they reclined, but they looked more like dentist’s chairs than like luxury furniture. “We decided to try to do something about the way the elements were put together and presented, to make them more comfortable, and to provide more of a club atmosphere,” he said.

The interiors that Park created for the Orient-Express trains resemble rolling versions of Downton Abbey, but achieving that effect while satisfying late-twentieth-century safety regulations required lots of modern technology. All of Park’s “loose-fit” woodwork had to be anchored securely enough to remain intact after a train wreck, and it had to be impregnated with a flame-retardant chemical and finished not with ordinary varnishes or paints but with what are known as “intumescent” coatings, which foam up when they’re exposed to high heat, forming an insulating layer that prevents the underlying wood from igniting.