I love the timeless design of the REK coffee table by Rotterdam-based designer Reinier de Jong, who works on both architectural and product design. The table is a brother of the acclaimed REK bookcase.
By easily sliding out the inner parts, you create extra table surface for guests or just to create some extra storage space.
Magic!
The black Magica and his sister, the white Magica2, will make anyone look twice. Their designer, the Italian Davide Conti, replaced two legs with plexiglass to create the illusion of an impossible balance.
The Magica’s are not in production yet, so manufacturers: give Davide a call!
London-based designer Benjamin Hubert created Foundation, a shelving system inspired by brutalist architecture. The brutalist architecture style flourished from 1950s until 1975 and spawned from the modernist architectural movement.
Just like the characteristic of this style, Foundation has striking repetitive angular geometries. You can also see the influence in the contrast between the industrial materials like the Valchromat shelves (organic coloured wood fibre panels derived from forest waste), the steel metal boxes, and the soft and smooth leather tabs on those boxes.
There’s something about his Simple Chair which I find really attractive… Maybe it’s the fact that it looks small, modest.
Whatever it is, Italian designer Emanuele Magini won the first prize with it in the Promosedia International Design Competition 2009 – Calazza Memorial Challenge.
The jury admired the chair’s design for its beauty and expressive simplicity and for the perfect balance and harmony of solid and void.
I guess that says it quite nicely, actually.
Inspired by “the playfulness of the big top” industrial designer Stephen Burks, founder of the New York studio Readymade Projects, created a hand-made shelving system. Burks – considered to be one of the most recognized American industrial designers of his generation – is with his studio responsible for creative direction and industrial design on projects ranging from retail interiors, events, packaging, consumer products and lighting.
The idea is simple; each unit includes up to eight steel, colorful, wired cages that can plugged in easily into the oak surfaces. This makes the shelving unit is easy to (dis-)assemble without any tools.
Circus, manufactured by Mattermade, is available in a 1, 2 or 3 shelves edition.
Sticks and stone won’t break my bones – they’ll hold my coat.
This here is a coat rack, designed by Lithuanian product/furniture designer Vytautas Gecas. The foot is made out of concrete, the stick are plain wood.
I love that it’s just sticks in a pot: two honest and unadorned materials, which come together to form a coat rack. No screws, no hinges, just friction and gravity.
German designer Uli Budde combined a magazine rack with a side table, thus creating Reading Table.
I could tell you how it works, but it’s perfectly self-explanatory – which may be the exact reason why I like it so much!
Reading Table comes in two different sizes, and two colours: white and red. I’ll take the white one ;-)
The Berlin-based Metrofarm studio created this bold walnut veneered double bed.
The bed was designed with a double function in mind: to be used as a lounge chair as well as a bed. The angle at the headrest allows you to go into an optimal chill position, as Metrofarm themselves describe it.
If the double bed is too much for you, there’s also a single bed, which is open on one side.
Dutch designer Bram Geenen created the Gaudi chair as a follow-up of his Gaudi stool.
Like the Gaudi stool, the Gaudi chair is developed by using the same methods (models of hanging chains) as Antoni Gaudi used to find the strongest shape for his impressive churches.
The construction of the chair is compared with the stool a bit more complicated due to the forces in the chairs backrest. That is why Geenen combined the chain models with a software script to determine a 3D printed structure of nylon ribs to distribute the forces of the backrest across the chair. The structure is covered by a thin shell of carbon fiber.
I myself am a pretty hardcore minimalist in my taste for furniture. I’m a sucker for that rational minimalism, where even the variation in an object’s proportions is brought down to the minimum. And so, cubes appeal to me.
Consider the Blox Cube. Doesn’t it remind you of our godfather Donald Judd’s cubes?
And then there’s its big brother, Blox Bench. Don’t put this against a wall, but in the middle of the room. Of course without piles of stuff on it!
(Before you continue to the rest of the images, please be warned: the mood shots are *really* tacky…)
