Seating comfort has always been a primary issue in the design of padded furniture pieces. This paper proposes a computational model‐based methodology to assist the designer willing to take comfort into account as a primary requirement for padded furniture design. The methodology is based on a virtual mannequin, which can be tailored to reproduce the average target user, and the complete assembly of the main elements composing a typical armchair. Since contact pressure distribution is recognized to be strictly related to seating comfort perception, the contact occurring between these components, during the seating act, was simulated by means of a finite element solver and the resulting contact pressure distribution was computed. Several simulations were carried out with reference to a set of different armchair layout and materials; the obtained results showed a reasonable agreement with the experimental data recorded by means of a capacitive mat. Finally, by using an exemplificative criterion based on comfort‐related pressure distribution parameters, the authors demonstrate the possibility of selecting the best‐performing configurations prior to building a physical prototype. The proposed approach, tested on a complex seat and a wide range of possible materials, can be considered of general applicability since 1) the virtual mannequin, as opposed to what is reported in a number of scientific works, is not requested to closely resemble a single test subject, and 2) the selected seat structure and seat components encompass the most commonly used ones for this kind of product so that a few generally applicable considerations can be drawn. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.