Author Archives: Ida Torres

Issey Miyake’s Most Beautiful Material Was Always the Scrap

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If you’ve ever watched the pleating process behind ISSEY MIYAKE’s iconic garments, you already know it’s one of the most satisfying things in fashion. The fabric goes in, it comes out textured and alive, and for decades, that has been the whole story. Satoshi Kondo, one of the design directors at MIYAKE DESIGN STUDIO, chose to flip the script. He looked not at the pleated garment coming off the machine, but at what was left behind: compressed rolls of wafer-thin paper, stacked and destined for the bin.

The result is The Paper Log: Shell and Core, a special exhibition running at the ISSEY MIYAKE Milan store this April, timed to coincide with Milan Design Week 2026. And it’s the kind of project that makes you want to rethink every process you’ve ever considered mundane.

Designer: Satoshi Kondo of MIYAKE DESIGN STUDIO

The paper in question is a production byproduct. These thin sheets are used to protect the fabric as it moves through the pleating machine, and when the garments are done, the sheets are rolled up, compressed, and typically moved off-site for recycling or disposal. What Kondo noticed during a visit to the manufacturer, though, was that these rolls look like logs. Not metaphorically, but structurally. Each compressed roll stands 80 cm tall and 40 cm wide, and when you look at the end of one, the layered paper creates a marbled, circular pattern that resembles the growth rings of a tree. Hence the name.

That visual parallel carries real weight. The Paper Log doesn’t just look like a tree trunk; it shares its logic. Growth rings mark time in a living thing, and the layers of the Paper Log carry the memory of every garment made at the house. It’s a surprisingly poetic idea from an industry that usually discards its footnotes.

For the exhibition, Kondo brought in Spanish architecture office Ensamble Studio to develop two distinct bodies of work from the same material. The first, Shell, takes the paper log apart and treats it like a sculptural material, creating crisp, delicate objects that feel frozen mid-process. They’re almost ghost-like, holding a shape the way paper holds a crease. The second body of work, Core, goes in the opposite direction. Here the paper is treated as structure, forming actual furniture prototypes including stools, chairs, and tables. Robust and handcrafted, these pieces sit in direct contrast to the fragility of Shell, and that tension is very much the point.

The installation is arranged throughout the store to play Shell and Core against each other, presenting opposing ideas side by side: ephemeral versus concrete, delicate versus robust. I find this curatorial framing genuinely effective. It’s rare to see a single waste material handled in ways that feel this philosophically distinct, and rarer still to see a fashion house direct that kind of rigorous design thinking toward something that would otherwise not exist at all.

What makes The Paper Log worth your attention beyond the visual spectacle is the quiet insistence that process deserves as much consideration as product. Issey Miyake has always been a house obsessed with how things are made. The pleating technology itself is a kind of philosophy, a belief that the mechanics of creation are as meaningful as the finished object. Applying that thinking to the waste materials of that same process feels less like an act of sustainability and more like an act of honesty.

Whether or not furniture made from fashion scraps becomes a commercial category (and it absolutely could), The Paper Log: Shell and Core operates primarily as a provocation. It asks what we overlook when we’re focused on the final product, and suggests that the answer might be the most interesting material in the room. The exhibition runs at the ISSEY MIYAKE Milan store on Via Bagutta 12, from April 21 to May 5, 2026.

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A Tiny Cabin in Hungary Is Quietly Rewriting Hospitality

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The cabin that keeps showing up in my feed sits in the forested hills of northern Hungary, and once you see it, it is genuinely hard to unsee it. NestOff, designed by architect and interior designer Péter Kotek, is a prefabricated micro-retreat measuring just 20 square meters. On paper, that sounds like a significant compromise. In practice, it reads like a very calm, very confident argument that most of us have been taking up far too much space for far too long.

I have a complicated relationship with the micro-living conversation. It tends to swing between two exhausting extremes: the breathlessly optimistic content creator who insists that 18 square meters is “more than enough space for everything,” and the architecture critic who reminds us, correctly, that small spaces have historically been a symptom of poverty rather than a lifestyle choice. NestOff somehow sidesteps both camps entirely. It is not pretending to be a permanent home, and it is not selling you a fantasy of radical simplicity. It is a retreat. A considered, intelligently designed retreat, tucked between trees in Romhány in northern Hungary, and it wears that identity with genuine confidence.

Designer: Peter Kotek

Kotek worked with cabin fabricator Tajga-Depo to partially build the structure off-site, which meant better precision, reduced material waste, and a significantly shorter construction timeline on location. The cabin sits on ground screw foundations rather than poured concrete, and that decision matters more than it might initially seem. It means the structure can eventually be relocated without leaving a scar on the landscape beneath it. In an era when “eco-conscious design” has become something of a branding exercise, NestOff actually follows through on the promise. The land remains largely undisturbed. That is a genuinely rare thing to be able to say.

Inside, birch plywood covers the walls, ceilings, and built-in furniture, giving the space a warm and continuous quality that feels more like inhabiting a well-crafted object than occupying a room. The panoramic opening does exactly what a good view should do: it pulls the outside in without letting the outside overwhelm the interior. You are still in an enclosed, protected space, but the valley stretches out in front of you like a second room you never had to build or pay for. Kotek clearly understood that in a cabin this size, the view is not a bonus feature. It is structural.

The outdoor program is where NestOff gets particularly interesting. Two black timber vertical board cabins, the main unit and a separate sauna structure, are connected by a tiered larch deck. A hot tub sits alongside it. The sequence of spaces, moving from the interior out to the deck and then to the sauna and back, creates a rhythm of use that feels more deliberate than most full-sized hotels ever manage to achieve. Rest, bathing, sitting outside, going back in. It is not complicated. It is just very well thought out.

I keep returning to the question of what we actually need from a retreat. Not a vacation, which tends to involve airports, itineraries, and the performance of relaxation, but a genuine retreat. My honest answer is: not much. A bed. A meaningful view. Hot water. A reason to put the phone away. NestOff covers all of it within 20 square meters and a larch deck, and it does so without apology. That is not a failure of ambition. That is ambition pointed firmly in the right direction.

The micro-cabin category is crowded right now. Everyone from Scandinavian design studios to Silicon Valley-adjacent startups has something competing in that space. What separates NestOff from the noise is its complete absence of performance. It is not trying to impress you with a feature list or a manifesto. It is trying to give you a few nights in the Hungarian hills with nowhere else to be, and it is quietly very good at that one thing. Sometimes, that really is the whole point.

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Dórica Just Proved Good Design Belongs on Your Kitchen Counter

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Most of us have at least one object in our home we’ve never actually looked at. The napkin holder. The fruit basket. The candle holder that’s been sitting on the same shelf for three years. We use these things daily, sometimes multiple times, and yet they exist in this strange invisible space between functional and forgotten. That’s exactly the space that Sebastián Ángeles decided to design for.

Ángeles is the founder and creative director of Dórica, a Mexico City-based contemporary furniture brand that has spent years building a quiet but increasingly well-regarded reputation for pieces that prioritize longevity over trend. Their chairs, benches, and credenzas have found their way into residential, commercial, and hospitality spaces, and the brand has been recognized as one of the most relevant contemporary furniture names coming out of Mexico. But with Prea, released in February 2026 and recently featured by Wallpaper, Ángeles shifted his focus somewhere more intimate: the objects you reach for without thinking.

Designer: Sebastián Ángeles for Dórica

Prea is labeled “Chapter II” in Dórica’s story, and the brand describes it as their first collection of everyday objects. It’s a small but considered group of pieces, including an egg basket, a fruit basket, a candelabra, and a napkin holder, each designed and produced in Mexico with a clear emphasis on wood and ceramic, clean lines, and what the brand calls “material honesty.” The pieces are not elaborate. They don’t announce themselves when you walk into a room. And that restraint is, I think, the entire point.

Wallpaper described Prea as “a study in restraint,” and that feels right. But I’d push it further. Prea is actually a philosophical statement wrapped in a very practical object. The brand’s own language around the collection is striking: “Design here does not decorate. It holds. It supports. It allows the ordinary to be seen.” That’s not the kind of copy you expect from a brand selling a napkin holder. It’s the kind of thought that makes you pause.

We talk constantly in design circles about the gap between high design and everyday life, between the gallery object and the kitchen counter. Dórica seems genuinely uninterested in that gap existing at all. The premise of Prea is that the objects living alongside our daily rituals, the things we touch without registering that we’re touching them, deserve the same level of intentionality that goes into a statement chair or a sculptural lamp. Not to make them more important than they are, but to acknowledge that they already are important. We just stopped noticing.

There’s a Mexican design perspective embedded in this that feels worth acknowledging. The brand has always positioned itself around craftsmanship and longevity rather than novelty, and Prea continues that ethos into a new category. It’s a move that says something about how Ángeles sees the role of design in everyday life: not as a luxury layer applied to living, but as something woven into the texture of it.

I’ll be honest, when I first looked at the collection, my instinct was that it seemed minimal to the point of simplicity. A fruit basket is a fruit basket. But the more I sat with the images and the thinking behind the work, the more that restraint started to feel like confidence. These pieces don’t need to perform. They just need to be present, well-made, and honest. In a market saturated with objects begging for your attention, that’s a harder thing to pull off than it looks.

Prea is also a smart move for Dórica as a brand. Entering the everyday objects category at this level of intention signals a maturity that not every furniture brand is willing to commit to. It’s easier to scale up into bigger, more visible pieces. Scaling down into the egg basket, and making it mean something, takes a different kind of confidence. If you’re the kind of person who has ever picked up a beautifully made object and held it for just a second longer than you needed to, this collection is worth seeking out.

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The ZERO Chair Has No Welds, No Joints, No Apologies

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Most chairs are built on compromise. You stack the legs, screw the seat, bolt the back, and somewhere in that assembly, a little bit of the original idea gets lost to the necessity of structure. Davide Bozzo’s ZERO Chair refuses to play that game entirely.

The concept is almost confrontationally simple: one single ribbon of metal, bent and curved into a complete chair. No welds holding two pieces together. No joints disguised under upholstery. No hardware quietly doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes. Just one continuous piece of material pushed into a form that includes the base, the cantilevered seat, and the backrest all at once. The name isn’t branding. It’s a philosophy.

Designer: Davide Bozzo

Looking at the photographs, the first thing I kept circling back to was the sheer audacity of the backrest. It doesn’t connect to the base through hidden brackets or clever joinery. It simply rises from the same ribbon, curving upward and backward in a motion that looks more like a wave caught mid-break than anything you’d typically call furniture. It’s graceful in a way that makes you slightly suspicious of it. How is this thing holding anyone’s weight?

The answer lies in what Bozzo describes as structural tension. Form doesn’t just follow function here. It is the function. The material itself carries the engineering logic. Every curve has a reason, and every bend is calculated to distribute load through the continuity of the form rather than through added components. It’s the same principle behind suspension bridge cables or the way a curved shell is structurally stronger than a flat panel. Applied to a chair, it feels almost radical.

I’ll be honest. My first instinct was skepticism. A single-piece metal chair sounds like one of those design school exercises that makes for great renderings but falls apart under real scrutiny. But looking at the close-up photographs, especially the one capturing the S-curve where the seat meets the backrest, you start to believe it. The brushed metal finish shows actual material depth and actual intentionality in how the surface was treated. This isn’t a concept render floating in a void. It has weight and presence.

That said, I do have questions. Comfort is conspicuously absent from the conversation. Metal, even beautifully formed metal, is hard. The cantilevered seat gives some flexibility, which should help, but a chair without cushioning asks something significant of the person sitting in it. Bozzo’s design makes a statement about material honesty and structural purity, which I respect deeply, but at some point a chair has to be sat in. That’s the tension that makes it interesting rather than just pretty.

The piece also reads as a quiet counterargument to the current era of maximalist furniture. We’ve spent years surrounded by bouclé armchairs, curved velvet sofas, and furniture dressed up in layers of texture and warmth. Bozzo’s chair strips all of that away and asks whether furniture can earn your attention through restraint and engineering alone. My honest opinion? It can. Whether it earns a place in your living room is a different question entirely.

The chair also does something that doesn’t get discussed enough in design coverage: it makes the negative space part of the design. The open rectangle formed by the base creates a void that’s almost as deliberate as the metal itself. In the lifestyle image set against a Japanese garden backdrop, that void frames the gravel and ground beyond it. The chair becomes a viewfinder. That’s not accidental. That’s a designer who understands that what you leave out is just as powerful as what you put in.

Bozzo has been building a reputation for material-forward work. His stainless steel pet bowl Dune explored similar ideas around fluid curves in a single medium, but the ZERO Chair feels like a significant step up in ambition. It’s the kind of piece that stops you mid-scroll, makes you set your phone down, and actually think. That, more than any material specification, is probably the point.

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Foshan’s Forgotten Warehouses Got a Rooftop Park Under Floating Domes

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Somewhere along the Huadi River in Foshan, China, a cluster of old grain storage warehouses has been turned into one of the most quietly poetic pieces of architecture I’ve seen all year. The Yongping Warehouse Renovation, completed in 2025 by Guangzhou-based Atelier cnS, is exactly the kind of project that makes you stop scrolling and actually look.

The site sits in Dali Town, Nanhai District, a former industrial pocket of the Pearl River Delta that’s been gradually shedding its factory-town skin in favor of something more livable and publicly accessible. These particular warehouses, lined up along the riverfront, were derelict grain storage buildings with no obvious future. Not exactly glamorous source material. But Atelier cnS didn’t flinch, and the result is a project that earns its attention without asking for it loudly.

Designer: Atelier cnS

Because the site has a narrow footprint, the architects pushed the public space upward, placing a landscaped rooftop park above the commercial interiors below. Vertical programming isn’t a new idea, but what makes Yongping feel different is how thoughtfully the transition between levels was handled. The gaps between warehouse blocks weren’t sealed or filled in. Instead, they were preserved and widened into passageways, so as you move through the building, you catch glimpses of the river framed by walls before the whole view opens up at the top. It’s a slow reveal, and it’s deliberate.

And then there are the canopies. A series of translucent, domed structures built from hexagonal frames cluster across the roofline like a quiet gathering of clouds. Atelier cnS actually named the project “A Wisp of Cloud” over Huadi River, and the photos earn that name completely. The domes are light-diffusing, casting shade without blocking river views. They create zones for sitting, moving, and play without ever feeling like they’re closing the space in. They look like they arrived gently, rather than being imposed on the building below them.

The rooftop itself is shaped into slopes, steps, and play surfaces that echo the original pitched forms of the warehouse roofs. It’s one of those details that most visitors probably won’t consciously register, but it’s exactly the kind of architectural memory that makes a renovation feel grounded rather than gratuitous. The old buildings aren’t being pretended out of existence. The new design is in active conversation with what was there before.

I’m genuinely drawn to this project because it gets the balance right in a way that many adaptive reuse projects don’t quite manage. Too often, the renovations that attract the most attention are the ones where the new design overwhelms the original structure, turning the old building into nothing more than a convenient shell. Yongping avoids that trap. The warehouses are still very much present. Their bones dictate the rhythm, the circulation, and some of the visual language of the final result. You can feel the history of the place without having to read about it first.

Atelier cnS has been developing this kind of thinking for years. The studio’s earlier work on elevated public circulation, including a “roof-hopping” design approach explored in their White House Guesthouse project, signals a long-running interest in finding new life in existing structures. Yongping feels like a maturation of that sensibility. More refined, more integrated, and more tuned in to the texture of a neighborhood mid-transition.

The project spans 4,311 square meters, and it’s worth noting what it does beyond the architecture itself. Turning a commercial renovation into a publicly accessible rooftop park, in a district shifting away from its industrial past, is a real act of generosity. A park on a roof could easily read as a private amenity. Here, it reads like a gift to the neighborhood, a place to walk, rest, and look out at the river without needing a reason to be there.

Architecture doesn’t always need to announce itself to be worth paying attention to. The Yongping Warehouse Renovation is understated, purposeful, and lit from above by a cluster of translucent domes that look, from a distance, exactly like a wisp of cloud over the river.

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Rimowa Just Made the Classiest Excuse to Never Unpack

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Most people treat their Rimowa suitcase like a very expensive houseguest: it arrives looking spectacular, gets shoved in a closet, and stays there until the next trip. Rimowa, apparently, has thoughts about this. And so does Lehni.

The two brands have just unveiled a limited-edition furniture collaboration at Salone del Mobile 2026 in Milan, and it might be the most quietly audacious thing either brand has done in recent memory. The collection consists of two pieces: a Bench and a Drawer, both crafted in anodized aluminum, both designed to hold cabin-sized Rimowa suitcases inside your home. Not in a storage room. Not under your bed. On display, like they were always meant to be there. Which, if you’ve ever owned a Rimowa, you’d know they kind of were.

Designers: Rimowa x Lehni

The Bench is an open-shelving unit that holds two cabin-sized suitcases side by side. It is clean, low-slung, and just architectural enough to look at home next to a mid-century credenza or a spare Scandinavian sofa. The Drawer offers a different kind of storage: a sculptural, closed-frame unit with a built-in drawer for smaller items. Both pieces come in silver and black anodized aluminum, and both carry the embossed Grid pattern that echoes the grooved exterior of a classic Rimowa Original. That detail is not accidental. It’s the kind of material continuity that makes a collection feel cohesive rather than like a brand licensing deal gone slightly off the rails.

The craft side of this is worth paying attention to. Lehni has been working with aluminum since 1922, when Rudolf Lehni opened a sheet metal workshop in Zürich that quickly became a gathering place for artists and architects. That legacy still shows. Today, the company is run by the fourth generation of the Lehni family out of Dübendorf, and every piece is handmade in their Zurich factory. Each shelf on the Bench, for instance, is lined with a specially developed scratch-resistant felt mat to protect the cases stored on it. You notice that kind of thinking. These are small decisions that add up to something much larger than the sum of their parts.

Rimowa, for its part, has been on a quiet but consistent streak of repositioning itself as something more than a travel brand. The aluminum suitcase has already crossed over into fashion and streetwear culture through collaborations with names like Dior, Supreme, and Porsche. Moving into furniture feels like the next logical step, and frankly, it makes more sense than most luxury crossovers I’ve seen. The material language stays the same. The level of craft stays the same. The only thing that changes is the context, which is exactly what makes this feel like a genuine design idea rather than a marketing exercise.

That said, let’s be real: this is not furniture for everyone. The Bench is priced at $4,275, the collection is limited-edition, and in the US it’s only available in the continental states by contacting Rimowa’s client services directly. There’s no add-to-cart button. That purchasing friction is intentional, and it’s the kind of intentional that has a very specific audience in mind: the person who already owns the suitcase, already loves it, and wants their home to reflect the same aesthetic sensibility. I don’t think that’s a bad audience to build for. Niche, yes. But well-defined.

My honest take is that the Rimowa Lehni collection succeeds because it doesn’t try to explain itself too hard. It doesn’t need to. Two brands that both work in aluminum, both care about precision, and both have long histories with good design sat down and made something that looks exactly like what you’d expect from that pairing. The result is a bench and a drawer that feel less like a product launch and more like an obvious conclusion. Sometimes the best collaborations aren’t the surprising ones. They’re the ones that make you wonder why it took this long.

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Piaget Just Moved the Watch From Your Wrist to Your Neck

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The watch industry has a well-earned reputation for doing the same thing over and over again, just with slightly thinner cases and flashier complications each year. So when a brand genuinely surprises you, it feels worth talking about. Piaget’s Swinging Pebbles, unveiled at Watches and Wonders 2026, did exactly that for me.

These are not watches you wear on your wrist. They’re pendant watches, sculpted entirely from a single slice of semiprecious stone and hung from sinuous twisted gold chains. The stone isn’t just decorative trim or a dial insert. The case itself is stone. The whole object is stone, hollowed out just enough to house a manufacture movement, then sealed back into a smooth, organic pebble shape. You clasp it, but you don’t strap it. It lives at your collarbone, not your pulse point.

Designer: Piaget

That shift alone deserves attention. The industry has spent decades debating millimeters of case diameter and whether 40mm is too big or too small for a modern watch. Piaget essentially said: what if none of that matters and the watch just hangs from your neck like a very beautiful rock? It’s a deeply different kind of confidence.

The collection comes in three stone varieties: golden tiger’s eye, grass-green verdite, and pietersite, each with its own mood and temperature. Tiger’s eye has that warm, chatoyant shimmer that catches light differently depending on your angle. Verdite is earthy and lush, the color of an old botanical illustration. Pietersite is the most dramatic of the three, with its stormy, swirling blues and golds that look like a weather system captured in mineral form. Choosing between them feels less like selecting a product variant and more like choosing a personal talisman.

The design draws from two specific moments in Piaget’s archive. The first is the Swinging Sautoirs of the 1970s, a collection born in an era when watches were fused into coins, envelopes, and dice, and wearing one was a full sensory experience. The second is a lesser-known reference: Piaget’s asymmetrical kimono pocket watches from 1974, crafted in malachite and designed to rest in the palm like a smooth river stone. The Swinging Pebbles are clearly carrying those ideas forward, but they don’t feel like a costume. The connection to the archive is felt rather than announced.

Yves Piaget once said, “A watch is first and foremost a piece of jewellery.” The Swinging Pebbles are probably the most literal interpretation of that philosophy the maison has ever produced. The movement is almost beside the point, which is a strange thing to say about a Swiss luxury watch. But the pieces use a quartz caliber (the 355P), and I actually think that’s the right call here. Piaget didn’t let a mechanical complication turn these into something bulky or precious in the wrong way. They stayed committed to the object’s identity as jewelry, and the quartz movement quietly agrees to stay out of the way.

My personal take: this is the kind of design that makes you rethink what a watch category even is. Pendant watches exist at a rare intersection of horology, sculpture, and wearable art, and most brands either treat that intersection as a novelty or ignore it entirely. Piaget has always been the exception. They’ve been dressing dials in lapis lazuli, turquoise, and tiger’s eye since 1963, and this new collection feels like a natural exhale from six decades of accumulated stone fluency.

Whether or not you’d actually wear one is a separate conversation, and probably a deeply personal one tied to your relationship with jewelry, self-expression, and how much you enjoy being the most interesting person in the room. But as an object, as a design statement, as a piece of thinking about what a watch can be, the Swinging Pebbles are quietly radical. They’re not trying to modernize a classic. They’re trying to remind you that some classics were already ahead of their time.

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Dozie Kanu Just Turned His Life Story Into Tables for Knoll

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A table is just a table until it isn’t. That’s the kind of thinking that gets lost in a lot of design conversations, where we spend so much time talking about materiality and silhouette that we forget to ask what an object is actually carrying. The Dozie Kanu Table Collection for Knoll, debuting at Salone del Mobile 2026, makes that question impossible to ignore.

Kanu is an American artist who grew up in Texas with Nigerian immigrant parents. That detail matters enormously here, because it shaped a perspective that doesn’t fit neatly into any one cultural box. He’s spoken openly about the displacement that came with that upbringing, about not being fully accepted by the Black community, about existing in-between. “Growing up in Texas with Nigerian immigrant parents, I was not fully accepted by the Black community… it created a feeling of displacement. And that feeling is everywhere in my practice.” And that sense of in-between-ness is exactly what makes his design language so compelling to look at.

Designer: Dozie Kanu for Knoll

The collection itself is three pieces: a console, a coffee table, and a side table. All three are built with taut leather surfaces and rounded steel rod edges, and all three trail floor-length leather tassels that move with a life of their own. The tassels are the thing that catch your eye first, and they’re meant to. They pull from African drums, from African ceremonial dress, and from the fringed leather jackets of Texas cowboy culture. That last reference might seem like an odd pairing, but that’s kind of the point. Kanu isn’t choosing between his influences. He’s letting them coexist.

Available in two colorways, bronze and a dark grey manganese, the pieces have a quiet formality that makes the tassels even more striking. The restraint of the forms makes the ornamentation feel intentional rather than decorative. You don’t look at these tables and think “maximalism.” You think “precision.” The tassels earn their place because everything else is so considered.

Knoll, for the record, is not a brand that takes collaborations lightly. Their roster has historically included Eero Saarinen and Mies van der Rohe, which means choosing Kanu for this moment says something. It says they’re paying attention to who’s shaping the conversation around contemporary design. Kanu, who has built a practice across sculpture and installation, is exactly the kind of artist who brings a point of view that doesn’t get diluted in the translation to mass production. His own framing of the work says it perfectly: “It’s not screaming ‘identity’ or ‘autobiography.’ But the best thing I can do is make what I know.”

That line is worth sitting with. We’re living through a design moment where cultural narrative has become something of a selling point, and there’s a real risk of it becoming performative. What Kanu is doing feels different. It’s not a press release in object form. It’s more like a very personal shrug that happens to be beautiful. The tassels don’t announce themselves as symbols. They just exist, and they carry the weight of a story without demanding that you read it.

Running alongside the Knoll launch, Kanu also has an installation at ICA Milano in collaboration with the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, featuring a structure built from reinforced cardboard. It’s a reminder that his practice spans a lot of registers, that the tables and the gallery work are part of the same ongoing conversation he’s having with himself. I appreciate that kind of consistency in an artist. You can feel the through-line even when the mediums are completely different.

If I’m being honest about what this collection does to the broader design conversation, I think it’s a useful reminder that furniture doesn’t have to be neutral to be functional. A table can have a perspective. It can come from somewhere very specific without being inaccessible. And when a brand like Knoll gives that kind of work the platform it deserves, the results are worth paying attention to far beyond the walls of Milan Design Week. Dozie Kanu’s tables are at Salone del Mobile 2026. They move when you walk past them. And they’ve got a lot to say.

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Desire Paths, Plywood, and a Stool That Gets It

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Have you ever noticed the worn-down patches of grass in a park where people have chosen to walk instead of staying on the designated path? That’s a desire path, and urban planners have a complicated relationship with them. Some see them as a nuisance, proof that people refuse to follow the plan. Others see them as data, clear evidence that the original design missed something. Fabrício Reguelin Auler falls firmly in the second camp, and his Shortcut Stool is one of the more thoughtful pieces of furniture I’ve come across in a while.

The concept behind the Shortcut Stool (or Atalho Bench, as it’s also known) is deceptively simple: what if furniture was designed around the way people actually use it, rather than the way designers intended? That means acknowledging all the small, unconscious behaviors we exhibit at home. Sitting on the very edge of a stool instead of the center. Resting a bag on it before finding somewhere better. Perching on it for thirty seconds while tying a shoe. Using it as a surface for a glass of water when every other surface is occupied. None of this is “correct” use. And yet, all of it is completely normal.

Designer: Fabrício Reguelin Auler

This is where I think a lot of furniture falls short. Design, especially at the higher end of the market, tends to be prescriptive. There’s an implied right way to use a piece, and deviating from it can feel almost disrespectful. Reguelin Auler flips that thinking entirely. The Shortcut Stool doesn’t pretend that people will interact with it perfectly. It welcomes the imperfection, and that’s genuinely refreshing.

Materially, the piece holds its own. It’s made from marine pine plywood, assembled through a system of interlocking joints that require no screws, bolts, or complicated hardware. What holds it all together is tensioned sisal rope, and this is the detail that makes the whole thing click, visually and structurally. The rope isn’t decorative in the way that so many “natural element” additions can feel forced. It’s actually doing the work, reinforcing the structure while giving the stool a texture that you want to reach out and touch. It makes the design feel honest, which is appropriate given what the piece is trying to say.

The modular nature of it is worth mentioning too. Single units can be connected to form a longer bench configuration, which means the Shortcut Stool scales with need rather than requiring you to commit to one fixed form. The flat-pack assembly and disassembly is straightforward, making it easy to move, store, or reconfigure. It comes in natural pine as well as painted versions in a deep cobalt blue and a muted sage green, both of which look sharp in context. The blue one especially has a kind of confident visual energy that punches well above the stool’s modest size, which is something I didn’t expect from a plywood bench.

What strikes me most is how the Shortcut Stool manages to make a philosophical argument without being heavy-handed about it. It’s not a design that comes with a manifesto attached. You can simply look at it, use it, and decide it works. But if you sit with the concept for a moment, there’s a bigger idea underneath: that the gap between how objects are designed and how they’re actually lived with is rarely addressed honestly in product design. Most things are built for ideal conditions. This stool was built for real ones.

It also raises a question I keep returning to: how many products in our homes are quietly working against us because they were designed without accounting for how people actually behave in real time? The Shortcut Stool is a small answer to a larger problem, and I appreciate that it arrives without fanfare, just plywood, rope, and a clear point of view. Fabrício Reguelin Auler has made something that earns its place in a home not by demanding attention, but by already understanding you. That’s a rare quality in any object.

The post Desire Paths, Plywood, and a Stool That Gets It first appeared on Yanko Design.

The 100-Year-Old Light Bulb Design Just Got Its First Real Fix

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We have been screwing the same shape of light bulb into our lamps for over a century. Think about that for a second. The smartphone in your pocket has been redesigned thousands of times since it launched. Your running shoes have gone through countless iterations. But the humble light bulb? More or less, the same. Which is exactly why iiode’s Re27 feels so refreshing, and so overdue.

iiode is a Swiss studio that specializes in sustainable electronics, and the Re27 is their first product. It’s a retrofit E27 LED bulb, meaning it fits into the same socket your current bulb uses right now. But the similarities to your average LED stop there pretty quickly.

Designer: iiode

The Re27 is built around an idea that the lighting industry has, for the most part, chosen to ignore: that a light bulb should be something you repair, not just replace. The bulb is modular, with clip-in components that can be swapped out when one part fails. You don’t have to toss the whole thing. You don’t have to buy a new one if one section gives out. The design actually encourages you to keep it going, which is a genuinely rare thing in consumer electronics of any kind.

The body is die-cast aluminum, and not the smooth, polished kind you might expect. The porosity of the casting creates a natural texture that helps dissipate heat while also giving the bulb a physical presence that’s hard to describe without actually seeing it. Domus called it a texture that “overturns expectations regarding the materiality and aesthetic presence of this everyday object,” and I think that’s a fair read. It’s a bulb you actually want to look at, which sounds like a strange thing to say about something that usually lives inside a shade.

Almost all of the materials are recycled, and the whole thing is assembled in Switzerland using mostly EU-made parts. For anyone who has started paying attention to where their products actually come from, that matters. The Re27 doesn’t just gesture at sustainability the way so many products do now, folding it into their marketing as an afterthought. It builds it into the structure of the object itself.

The light quality is where iiode earns serious points. The Re27 delivers a high CRI output, which means colours under its light look the way they’re supposed to, the way they’d look in natural daylight. It’s flicker-free, which is one of those things you don’t notice until you’ve been sitting under bad lighting for three hours and your eyes are tired for no apparent reason. The colour temperature and intensity are tunable, and the smart control is integrated directly into the bulb, so you don’t need a separate hub or app ecosystem to make it work.

To celebrate the launch, iiode invited eight design studios to create lampshades specifically for the Re27. It’s the kind of move that tells you a lot about how a brand sees its own product. They’re not treating it as a commodity. They’re treating it as an object worth designing around, worth collaborating over, worth dressing up. That creative confidence comes through in every aspect of what they’ve built.

The Re27 is currently available for pre-order, and iiode is presenting it during Milan Design Week 2026 as part of the House of Switzerland Milano showcase. Seeing it make its way into that conversation, alongside furniture, installations, and collectible pieces, makes complete sense. The Re27 belongs there not because it’s trying to be art, but because it’s genuinely well-considered design applied to something we use every single day.

Lighting is one of those things most of us don’t think about until it’s wrong. The Re27 is a bulb made by people who clearly think about it all the time, and the result is something that makes you want to pay attention too. Sometimes the most interesting design isn’t the flashiest object in the room. Sometimes it’s just the light that makes the room worth being in.

The post The 100-Year-Old Light Bulb Design Just Got Its First Real Fix first appeared on Yanko Design.