Author Archives: Ida Torres

The Colombian Roof Tile That Became a Desk Organizer

Posted on by

Most desk organizers are purely functional objects. You buy one because you’re tired of your keys ending up under a notebook, or because your earbuds have gone missing again for the third time this week. Utility is the promise, and usually, that’s where the conversation ends. TEJA, designed by Gustavo Rodríguez and Estefanía Agudelo of Estudio Gris in Medellín, Colombia, makes a case that it doesn’t have to.

The name is the Spanish word for a roof tile, and the reference is direct. Traditional clay tiles have shaped the rooflines of Colombian towns for centuries, their curved profiles doing exactly one thing extremely well: shedding water while creating shade. Rodríguez and Agudelo looked at that form and asked a genuinely good design question: what if you kept only what matters? The answer is TEJA. A lacquered steel surface that curves upward at both ends, resting on a solid natural wood base. The curve does the same job here that it does on a rooftop, just on a smaller, quieter scale. It keeps things from rolling away and, in doing so, gathers them.

Designers: Gustavo Rodríguez & Estefanía Agudelo (Estudio Gris)

At the center, a small circular platform rises from the surface. It’s a tiny detail that turns out to do a lot. Rings land there instead of disappearing into a drawer. An earbud case. A coin you keep forgetting to put somewhere intentional. The platform gives these small, easily lost things a designated home, and that specificity is exactly the kind of thoughtfulness that separates well-designed objects from well-marketed ones.

The piece works equally well on a desk or a dresser, which matters more than it sounds. A lot of objects are styled for one context and feel awkward in another. TEJA slides between the two without trying, because its logic is architectural rather than functional in the narrow sense. It organizes by shape, not by category.

The moment that might surprise you most is what happens when you place three of them together. Side by side, they read as a roofscape, a miniature version of the reference they were born from. The designers didn’t plan that effect. It emerged from the object’s own internal rules. That’s the mark of a design that was thought through past the obvious. Most things only reveal their full intention under a single set of conditions. TEJA shows you something new when the context shifts.

It comes in six colors: terracotta, white, calm green, blue, mustard, and beige. The first three are kept in stock; the last three are made to order. All of them are handmade in Medellín. I have a soft spot for the terracotta, partly because it’s the most honest color for an object inspired by clay tiles, and partly because that warm, muted orange reads beautifully against both light and dark surfaces without fighting for attention. The calm green and mustard are equally considered. None of the six feel trendy in the way that becomes awkward in two years.

Estudio Gris won the DesignWanted Award in Italy in 2026 with CLU, their umbrella stand, which suggests that TEJA isn’t a one-time gesture. The studio seems to have a consistent interest in translating familiar forms into objects that hold meaning without being decorative about it. That’s a harder balance to strike than it looks.

The wider question TEJA raises, at least for me, is why we keep settling for objects that only work and never mean anything. We spend a fair amount of time at our desks and dressers. The things that live on those surfaces become part of how the space feels day to day. A desk organizer that carries a genuine reference to Colombian vernacular architecture, made by hand in the city where its designers live and work, is a different kind of object than a generic tray from a home goods store. You don’t have to think about that every time you drop your keys into it. But it’s there if you do.

The post The Colombian Roof Tile That Became a Desk Organizer first appeared on Yanko Design.

Japanese Designer Just Built a Real Shelf From Rolled Paper Sheets

Posted on by

When Japanese designer Muto Yumi set out to make furniture from paper, the result was not what most people would imagine. No papier-mâché. No origami-inspired folding. No cardboard box aesthetics salvaged and called art. What she produced is a modular furniture system so structurally sound and visually precise that it makes you question almost everything you assume about material strength and decorative surface.

The project is called Pattern as Structure, and the name is not just poetic framing. It is literally the concept. Muto starts with flat sheets of paper pre-cut with holes arranged in a specific pattern. Roll that sheet tightly around itself, layer upon layer, and the paper transforms from something limp and delicate into a dense, rigid rod capable of bearing real weight. The physics of it are intuitive once explained, but watching it happen feels like a magic trick. A single sheet does nothing. Rolled and compressed, it becomes architecture.

Designer: Muto Yumi

Here is where it gets more interesting. Those pre-cut holes that look like a graphic pattern on the flat sheet? Once the paper is rolled into a rod, those holes become tunnels running through its body. They are the connection points of the whole system. Other paper rods slot through them, linking one piece to the next without glue or hardware. The pattern was never just decoration. It was always the joint, the connector, the system’s logic. The aesthetics and the engineering are the exact same thing.

That kind of design clarity is genuinely rare. Most furniture design separates surface from structure, treating them as two different problems to solve. A frame holds the load; a finish makes it beautiful. Pattern as Structure collapses that division entirely. The surface IS the structure. The decoration IS the joint. You cannot take one away without destroying the other, and that coherence is what makes the project feel so resolved.

What Muto has produced so far is a family of open shelves in varying sizes. They look clean and slightly architectural, like something you would expect to find in a gallery or a well-curated apartment. But the real achievement here is not the object itself. It is the proof of concept. Because the rods are made from printed paper sheets, the color and graphics on the surface can change infinitely without altering the construction method at all. Want a shelf in deep terracotta? Stripe patterns? Illustrated surfaces? Print the sheet differently and roll it the same way. The structural logic stays identical. The visual language can do whatever it wants.

For anyone paying attention to design right now, this matters. The conversation around sustainable materials has become crowded with beautiful ideas that fall apart under practical conditions. Paper furniture is not new, but paper furniture that is also modular, reconfigurable, and visually customizable without requiring any change to its fabrication process? That is a more sophisticated argument. It asks whether we really need virgin timber, powder-coated steel, or injection-molded plastic to make things that last and look good. Muto’s answer is apparently no.

I keep returning to the honesty of the material choice too. Paper does not pretend to be something else. It does not mimic wood grain or stone texture or metal sheen. It is exactly what it is, and somehow that straightforwardness makes the furniture more interesting, not less. The pattern on each rod is visible. You can see the rolled layers at the cut ends. The making is part of the looking.

Design that is this conceptually tight often sacrifices warmth or approachability in the process. Pattern as Structure avoids that trap. The pieces feel considered without being cold. They feel experimental without being precious. And for a project made from something as unassuming as a sheet of paper with holes punched through it, that balance is quietly remarkable. Muto Yumi is someone worth watching. Not because she is working with expensive materials or chasing spectacle. But because she is asking better questions about what furniture is actually made of, and why.

The post Japanese Designer Just Built a Real Shelf From Rolled Paper Sheets first appeared on Yanko Design.

Leica’s 220-Inch Mini Projector Wants to Replace Your TV

Posted on by

When Leica announced the Cine Compact 1, my first reaction landed somewhere between genuine curiosity and mild skepticism. Leica is a camera brand. A camera brand, the kind photographers carry like a quiet badge of honor, the kind that has defined a certain visual language for over a century. And now they want to replace my television?

Here is the thing: Leica has been making projectors since 1926. Before streaming was a concept, before most of us were born, they were already in the projection business. The Cine Compact 1 is not a prestigious camera brand drifting beyond its territory. It is one returning to an old, familiar one.

Designer: Leica

So what exactly is it? At the core, the Cine Compact 1 is a compact mini projector built around a Leica Summicron zoom lens with aspherical elements, a 0.47-inch DMD image chip, and Triple RGB laser technology. It delivers 4K resolution at up to 1,700 ANSI lumens, which is bright enough to produce a usable image in a room that is not completely blacked out. The maximum projection size is 220 inches diagonally, which is an absurd number for something small enough to sit on a coffee table.

The 360-degree rotation system is the detail I keep thinking about. Most projectors are prisoners of their setup requirements: flat surface, blank wall directly ahead, dedicated space. The Cine Compact 1 abandons that formula entirely. Wall, ceiling, anywhere in between. That flexibility is not just a convenience feature. It actually changes your relationship with watching at home. Ceiling projection during a movie night is a categorically different experience from staring at a flat panel mounted above a console.

Leica also built in their proprietary image processing technology, called Leica Image Optimization (LIO), to maintain consistent picture quality regardless of projection size or location. Pair that with Dolby Vision for contrast and brightness precision, and Dolby Digital and DTS Virtual:X for audio, and this is not a glorified slideshow device. It is a serious piece of home cinema equipment disguised as a coffee table accessory.

The design is Leica through and through: solid aluminum housing, a glass front, clean lines that read as refined rather than attention-seeking. Even switched off, it looks like it belongs on a shelf rather than something you drag out reluctantly. Its projected lifespan is 25,000 hours, which at a few hours of daily use amounts to decades of service. Smart streaming runs on VIDAA, so most of what you want to watch is accessible without plugging anything extra in.

My honest read on the Cine Compact 1 is that it is designed for a very specific kind of frustration: the one that comes from building your entire living space around a television. We spend years arranging furniture toward screens, painting walls in “TV-friendly” neutrals, negotiating actual square footage with a device that has one function. A projector like this shifts that equation. The screen exists when you need it. The room is yours the rest of the time.

Is it for everyone? No. Projectors still require more thought than a TV on a wall, and Leica’s pricing tends to reflect the brand’s premium heritage. But the people who will love this will love it unconditionally. The design-conscious person who thinks as carefully about how their space looks at two in the afternoon as they do at nine at night. The perpetually mobile person who wants a real cinema experience wherever they land. The person who is simply done negotiating living space with a large black rectangle.

Leica is not chasing a trend here. If anything, they are returning to something they were doing before most modern tech companies existed. The form is smaller, smarter, and more portable. The commitment to image quality behind it is exactly the same.

The post Leica’s 220-Inch Mini Projector Wants to Replace Your TV first appeared on Yanko Design.

Thousands of Paper Sheets, One Kiln, One $58K Prize

Posted on by

The first time I saw images of Jongjin Park’s Strata of Illusion, I genuinely could not figure out what I was looking at. It reads like a compressed canyon wall, like strata lifted from geological time, like something that took millennia to form. It does not look like something a person assembled in a studio over a matter of months. That disconnect between the familiar and the seemingly impossible is, I think, exactly the point.

Park is a Korean ceramic artist and assistant professor at Seoul Women’s University, and earlier this year he took home the 2026 LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize for Strata of Illusion, one of the most prestigious honors in contemporary craft. The prize comes with €50,000, but the work itself is worth far more attention than a check.

Designer: Jongin Park

Here is what makes it so remarkable. The sculpture is built from thousands of sheets of ordinary tissue paper. Park coats each sheet in porcelain slip mixed with hand-mixed pigments, then folds, stacks, and presses them together into a dense, rectilinear mass that resembles a partially collapsed seat. Then he fires the whole thing in a kiln. At high temperatures, the paper burns completely away. What remains is a ceramic body that has shifted, bent, and settled under its own weight and the heat, shaped not entirely by the artist’s hands but by forces the material encounters on its own.

The part of his process that genuinely floors me is the surrender in it. Park is not a sculptor in the traditional sense of someone who carves away or imposes a rigid vision onto a material. He sets up conditions. He coats the paper, arranges the layers, builds the compression, and then he cedes control to the kiln. The collapse is not an accident, but it is also not entirely planned. That charged zone between intention and surrender is exactly where Strata of Illusion lives, and it is a hard place to hold without losing your nerve.

The work also occupies a fascinating gray area between ceramics, sculpture, and design, which is part of why it travels so naturally across contexts. Park has shown at Design Miami and PAD London, and the piece feels equally at home in those collectible design spaces as it does in a fine art exhibition. A seat that cannot really be sat upon. A ceramic form that started as something you blow your nose with. A work that looks ancient but was completed last year. The contradictions stack up as deliberately as the paper layers themselves.

Park’s approach demands a kind of trust that is actually quite radical. Not just from the artist, but from the viewer too. You have to accept that the unpredictability is the craft, not the failure of it. We are so conditioned to equate mastery with perfect control that a work like this can feel destabilizing at first. That slight unease is doing something useful, though. It is making you examine what you actually value when you look at something made by hand.

The LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize has long recognized artists who use traditional craft languages to say something larger and more conceptually ambitious. Park’s win feels like a precise fit for that legacy. Strata of Illusion is not just technically extraordinary. It is philosophically loaded in a way that rewards slow, patient looking, which is increasingly rare and increasingly worth seeking out.

The exhibition featuring Park’s work alongside other shortlisted artists is on view at the National Gallery Singapore through June 14. If you happen to be anywhere near it, photographs alone will not prepare you for what the actual scale and texture of the object must feel like in person. There is a density to those compressed layers that images have no way of translating.

For the rest of us, Strata of Illusion offers a genuinely compelling answer to the question of where craft is headed. Not backward into nostalgia, not forward into pure concept. Somewhere in between, fired at high temperatures, shaped by forces no artist fully controls.

The post Thousands of Paper Sheets, One Kiln, One $58K Prize first appeared on Yanko Design.

One Revolution Per Minute: How THE MIROR Makes Time Visible

Posted on by

Most lamps exist to solve a problem: you need light, so you buy a lamp. THE MIROR Collection, by design studio MIRORlab, starts from a completely different premise. Rather than asking how to illuminate a room, it asks what light could be if it were designed to make you feel the passage of time. The answer is a kinetic lighting system that is part optical instrument, part ambient installation, and one of the more quietly radical design concepts I’ve come across in recent memory.

At its heart, THE MIROR is built around a slowly rotating light source paired with a set of six interchangeable magnetic glass lenses. Each lens contains embedded micro-patterns and textures that refract and fragment light into shifting projections across walls, ceilings, and floors. Nothing in the room physically changes. Yet from one minute to the next, the space looks and feels entirely different. The effect is genuinely mesmerizing, the kind of thing you notice out of the corner of your eye and then can’t stop watching.

Designer: MIRORlab

The detail worth dwelling on is the rotation speed: exactly one revolution per minute. That’s not an arbitrary number. It’s calibrated to align with a natural perceptual rhythm, slow enough to feel meditative rather than dizzying, but active enough that you remain aware of it at all times. The light is always doing something. It’s the design equivalent of a really good ambient soundtrack, present without being intrusive, affecting the room without demanding your full attention.

What MIRORlab is essentially arguing is that most lighting design treats time as irrelevant. You flip a switch, the room is lit, and that’s the end of the relationship. THE MIROR reframes light as a time-based medium, something that unfolds, rotates, and transforms continuously. No two projected moments are ever identical, even with the same lens. In that sense, it has less in common with conventional lighting and more in common with kinetic sculpture or generative art. The lamp isn’t just a tool for visibility. It’s a system for experiencing duration.

The six lenses, named Earth, Nebula, Dune, Bloom, Warmwhite, and Metropolis, were each developed through research into atmospheric perception and environmental light conditions. The reference points are genuinely cinematic: sunset diffusion across open landscapes, deep-space nebula imagery, solar eclipse transitions, water reflections under shifting cloud cover, and city lights seen from altitude at night. Most product designers think in finishes and colorways. MIRORlab thought in atmospheres. Swapping a lens doesn’t just adjust the quality of the light; it changes the entire emotional register of the room, and that’s a remarkable thing to get out of a piece of magnetized glass.

I think the broader cultural moment makes THE MIROR feel especially timely. We spend more time than ever in rooms that don’t change, and the relationship between a person and their living space has become both more intimate and more psychologically loaded. Design has started responding to that shift with a growing category of objects that prioritize atmosphere over function: white noise machines, scent diffusers, smart lighting systems, biophilic elements. All of them are answers to the same underlying question about how space should make us feel. THE MIROR fits cleanly into that conversation, but with a level of optical and conceptual depth that most of its peers simply don’t reach. It doesn’t just set a mood. It gives the room a sense of time passing, which is a genuinely different thing.

The more I sit with THE MIROR Collection, the less it feels like a lighting product and the more it feels like a quiet philosophical statement. It suggests that a room should move with you rather than simply surround you, that ambient experience doesn’t have to be passive, and that something as unassuming as a lamp can carry a real point of view about how we inhabit space. That’s a significant ask of a rotating glass lens. But if the projections look anything like the concept promises, it’s a completely fair one.

The post One Revolution Per Minute: How THE MIROR Makes Time Visible first appeared on Yanko Design.

RIMOWA’s Pokémon Collab Proves Nostalgia Travels Well

Posted on by

Thirty years ago, Pokémon taught an entire generation that the real adventure was the journey, not the destination. Now, RIMOWA is making that philosophy literal, and the result is one of the most covetable travel accessories of the year.

The collaboration, a Japan-exclusive capsule released on June 2, brings Pokémon-themed accessories to RIMOWA’s iconic suitcase lineup. We’re talking Poké Ball wheel sets, Pokémon-inspired luggage tags, and a limited-edition sticker set. The pieces are showcased alongside RIMOWA’s Essential line in bold Orange and Magenta, and the classic Original Cabin in Silver. If you need a moment to process how good that combination looks, take it.

Designer: RIMOWA

Collaborations between luxury brands and pop culture franchises are not new. We’ve seen high fashion shake hands with anime, streetwear collide with fine art, and sneakers morph into collector’s items worth more than a month’s rent. But the RIMOWA x Pokémon drop feels different, and not in the way that brands usually claim something is “different.” The distinction is in the credibility of both sides. RIMOWA has spent over a century building a reputation for precision engineering and design integrity. Pokémon has spent thirty years becoming one of the most enduring cultural franchises in history. When these two come together, the output isn’t just a product. It’s a statement.

The luggage tags are the quiet stars of this collection. Most people treat luggage tags as an afterthought, just a way to identify your bag on the carousel. But a Charmander or Charizard tag dangling from a polished aluminum case changes the conversation entirely. It turns your luggage into a flex, and the best kind: one that’s playful rather than pretentious. Charmander and Charizard are arguably the most beloved starter evolution line in the franchise, which means these tags carry genuine sentimental weight for anyone who spent their childhood glued to a Game Boy.

Then there are the stickers, and they matter more than you might think. RIMOWA has long encouraged travelers to use their suitcases as a canvas, a rolling record of everywhere they’ve been. The Pokémon sticker set fits that tradition naturally. It gives you something to place with intention, something that says a little about who you are before you even open your mouth at baggage claim. There’s a generational intimacy to Pokémon stickers on a luxury suitcase that feels earned rather than gimmicky.

The Poké Ball wheel sets round out the collection in the most theatrical way possible. You only really see them when the suitcase is moving, which makes the reveal almost cinematic. It’s design thinking at its most fun, and I appreciate that neither brand tried to make it subtle.

The Japan-exclusive angle is worth sitting with, though. It makes sense: Japan is the birthplace of Pokémon, and RIMOWA has a strong presence in the Asian market. A region-specific drop honors that cultural connection and keeps the collection genuinely limited. But if you’re a Pokémon fan, a RIMOWA enthusiast, or both, and you happen to not be in Japan, you’re essentially watching this happen through glass. Resale prices will be predictably painful, and that accessibility gap is the one thing that slightly dulls the shine of an otherwise excellent collaboration.

Still, Pokémon’s 30th anniversary has been a celebration done right. The franchise has rolled out collaborations across fashion, collectibles, and experiential activations throughout 2026, and the RIMOWA partnership sits at the top of that list in terms of design quality and cultural resonance. It understands its audience. It doesn’t try to be ironic or overly self-aware. It simply takes two well-crafted worlds and lets them coexist beautifully.

Good design is about making people feel something. A Charizard luggage tag on a polished aluminum suitcase makes you smile before your flight, and that’s not a small thing. Travel can be exhausting and deeply impersonal. A little bit of joy attached to your carry-on goes further than any airport lounge ever could. For collectors, this one is worth the chase. For everyone else, it’s a good reminder that luxury and nostalgia can share the same overhead bin, and sometimes, the most unexpected pairings are the ones that last.

The post RIMOWA’s Pokémon Collab Proves Nostalgia Travels Well first appeared on Yanko Design.

Seoul Has a New Shade of Cool, and It Folds Flat

Posted on by

Most urban design conversations center on permanence: the building, the plaza, the park. Fixed, costly, and slow to adapt. Seoul-based studio BKID Co is thinking differently, and the result is the Seoul Shade, a compact, foldable sunshade that quietly challenges the idea that public comfort has to be built into the ground.

BKID, founded by BongKyu Song in 2006, is the kind of studio that doesn’t stay in one lane. Song is a former Samsung designer who helped lead the design of the original Galaxy Tab. Over the years, BKID has built a portfolio that spans medical devices, car diffusers, furniture, and smart home tech, earning 13 iF Design Awards along the way and ranking number one in Korea for public design. The Seoul Shade feels very much like a continuation of that public-minded design ethos, this time applied to something deceptively simple: personal shade.

Designer: BKID Co

The concept takes the folding mechanism of a camping chair and applies it to a canopy structure sized for one to two people. Set it up in a few steps, pack it down flat, carry it with you. The whole thing is disarmingly low-tech, which is actually the point. When a design works this well without a battery or an app, you notice.

Visually, the Seoul Shade earns its place. The canopy is a stretched fabric panel held aloft by a lightweight tubular frame, and depending on the angle you catch it from, it looks like a wing, a sail, or a sculptor’s study of tension and curve. The product shots are beautiful, with users tucking themselves underneath in sandy fields and poolside terraces, which might feel aspirational to the point of absurdity, but they do communicate one thing clearly: the form has real presence. It’s not just a utility item. It looks considered.

What makes this more than a clever camping accessory is the urban application BKID has built into the concept. The studio envisions these shades deployed collectively, arranged in rows along pathways, fanned out around trees, clustered at event spaces. A single unit is practical. A fleet of them becomes temporary infrastructure, which is genuinely interesting from a city planning standpoint. Seoul’s summers are increasingly brutal, and heat-related interventions at the city scale are becoming less optional. The Seoul Shade proposes a lightweight, human-scale response that doesn’t require the city to commit to anything permanent.

There’s a part of me that wonders how this holds up in actual use. Wind is the obvious concern for any canopy-style structure that isn’t staked to the ground, and the images, as carefully styled as they are, don’t really address that. But this is still a concept, and BKID has a track record of bringing things to production in ways that account for those engineering realities. The studio describes its process as a balance between emotional aesthetics and logical engineering, which suggests they’re not ignoring the practical questions so much as staging the presentation around the vision first.

The broader appeal here, I think, is that the Seoul Shade represents a shift in how we think about personal comfort in public spaces. The expectation has long been that cities provide the shade, usually through trees that take decades to mature or structures that cost a fortune to install. Seoul Shade flips that: it says maybe comfort is portable, personalized, and doesn’t have to wait for infrastructure funding. That’s a genuinely useful reframe.

BKID has been consistent about designing objects that propose new behaviors rather than just solving obvious problems. The Seoul Shade is less about fixing shade scarcity and more about introducing the idea that public space can be made adaptive, one foldable canopy at a time. Whether it ends up being produced for mass distribution, deployed as a public event furnishing, or stays a proposal, the conversation it starts is worth having.

The post Seoul Has a New Shade of Cool, and It Folds Flat first appeared on Yanko Design.

KantorGG Just Built a Tropical Home That Faces the Wrong Way

Posted on by

Most tropical homes try to open up. Floor-to-ceiling glass, wraparound terraces, the constant push-pull between inside and outside air. It’s practically a formula at this point. So when a house comes along that deliberately turns away from that instinct, you stop and pay attention.

SE House, designed by Giovanni Gunawan of Surabaya-based studio KantorGG, sits at one of the city’s most recognizable residential corners and does something quietly radical: it pulls inward. Not to close off or shut the world out, but to create a kind of depth that most houses spend their entire floor plan actively avoiding.

Designer: Giovanni Gunawan for KantorGG (photos by Tristan Salim)

The concept is organized around a central courtyard, natural airflow, dry gardens, and the kind of deliberate voids that make space feel intentional rather than accidental. Gunawan placed dry gardens between the masses and the voids so residents experience the outdoors without sacrificing the comfort of being inside. It sounds simple enough. The execution is anything but. This is Gunawan’s stated interpretation of what tropical living can actually become, and I think he’s asking a question the design world has been skating past for years. We’ve gotten very good at making tropical homes look beautiful in photographs. We are considerably less practiced at making them feel like somewhere genuinely worth inhabiting on an ordinary Tuesday.

KantorGG’s design ethos centers on “living with nature, inside and out,” and SE House is probably the clearest expression of that philosophy yet. The existing mature trees on the site weren’t cleared to make room for clean lines. They were preserved as spatial anchors, the kind of decision that takes real confidence because it limits what you can do architecturally, and then rewards you generously in return. Shaded seating under dappled light, shifting reflections, the particular quality of sitting beneath something old and rooted. That’s not something you can manufacture after the fact.

The Australian-inflected sensibility woven through the design deserves a closer look. Gunawan studied abroad, and that cross-pollination shows up in SE House’s structure without being heavy-handed about it. The house doesn’t read as imported or imitated. It reads as absorbed and reissued through a sensibility that is distinctly Indonesian. That tension between influences, when handled well, produces architecture that belongs nowhere else and everywhere at once.

The 360-degree courtyard layout is worth sitting with on its own terms. It means the house has no single dominant view, no privileged front-row seat. Every room must negotiate with the central space, which keeps the architecture from becoming a spectacle and makes it a place to actually live inside. I find that rare, and more genuinely considered than most high-concept residential projects that pass through design media these days.

SE House has attracted the kind of attention that usually gravitates toward buildings with louder ambition. The buildings that announce themselves as you walk in. This one whispers, and that’s precisely why people are listening. Gunawan described it as a quiet manifesto for tropical living, and the word choice matters. A manifesto doesn’t have to be loud to carry weight.

The broader argument SE House seems to be making is that restraint isn’t the enemy of richness. The absence of visual noise isn’t emptiness. The voids aren’t what’s missing from the design. They are the design, or at least a fundamental part of what makes the rest of it land. That’s an architectural lesson, but it also translates well into how we think about design at every scale, from the objects we choose to live with to the spaces we build up around ourselves over time.

SE House is the kind of project that stays with you not because of one striking image but because of the underlying logic. It makes you want to look at your own spaces differently, and ask whether you’ve been opening up when you should have been pulling inward the whole time.

The post KantorGG Just Built a Tropical Home That Faces the Wrong Way first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Space Age Never Left, RETROCORE Just Made It Official

Posted on by

Every few years, design circles get swept up in nostalgia for a very specific era: the 1960s vision of the future. The curved furniture, the orbital shapes, the warm glow of a lamp that feels both alien and oddly cozy. We keep returning to it because, as futures go, it was a beautiful one to imagine, full of optimism and clean lines and a belief that living beautifully was something everyone deserved.

RETROCORE, the latest project from the team behind WOLOLOW, understands that pull completely. Designed by Arthur Koshatahyan and Kostya Trunov, it’s a modular wall and ceiling lighting system that borrows the visual language of Space Age design and reframes it as something you can actually build into your home, your studio, or anywhere light and personality intersect.

Designers: Arthur Koshatahyan and Kostya Trunov

The concept is deceptively simple. At its core, RETROCORE is made up of individual light panels that combine into custom configurations, scaling up from a single accent piece to a full architectural installation. Two panel types do the heavy lifting: MONO, which features a single illuminated aperture, and QUATRO, which carries four within the same square format. Snap them together in different arrangements and you’re essentially composing with light, the way someone might arrange art on a wall or tiles across a floor. The configurations can stay small and subtle or grow into something that commands the room entirely.

That modularity is the whole point, and it’s where RETROCORE separates itself from the usual retro-inspired lighting piece that looks great in a showroom and then sits stubbornly in one corner forever. Koshatahyan and Trunov describe it as “a new way to bring Space Age design into modern interiors, not only as a lamp, but as a modular building block of light.” And that framing matters. It positions RETROCORE not as decor, but as infrastructure, something that can grow, change, and adapt alongside the spaces it inhabits.

The backstory is worth knowing. WOLOLOW began as a UFO-shaped night light, a miniature riff on the iconic Futuro House, that tiny flying-saucer dwelling designed by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen in the late 1960s. That first product found an audience, went through the full crowdfunding process, and the lessons from building, manufacturing, and shipping a physical design object directly shaped what came next. RETROCORE isn’t a pivot so much as an evolution, a deeper commitment to the same aesthetic universe but with far more ambition built in.

One quietly clever detail: the white version of the panels can be repainted after installation. That means the lighting can blend seamlessly into a surface, disappearing into the ceiling or wall and leaving only the glowing apertures visible, or it can be deliberately contrasted against a painted background. It’s a small thing, but it shows the kind of considered thinking that separates a product designed to be sold from one designed to be lived with over time.

Retro-futurism as an aesthetic tends to get treated as a costume. You slap some Jetsons curves on a lamp, call it Space Age, and move on. RETROCORE doesn’t quite fall into that trap. The modular logic behind it feels genuinely contemporary, even as the visual references are firmly rooted in mid-century optimism. It’s the difference between wearing a vintage look and actually understanding why it worked in the first place, and why it still does.

Whether you install one panel as a quiet nod to the era or map out an entire ceiling composition, RETROCORE offers what a lot of statement lighting simply can’t: the ability to keep editing. Your room changes, your taste shifts, your wall gets repainted, and the system accommodates all of it without you having to start over.

For a design moment that often prizes the singular, precious object, there’s real appeal in something built to be rearranged. RETROCORE is currently on Kickstarter, and if it delivers on what the images promise, it could work just as well in a minimalist apartment as it does in a maximalist creative studio. That flexibility, more than the retro aesthetics, is the actual sell.

The post The Space Age Never Left, RETROCORE Just Made It Official first appeared on Yanko Design.

Frankfurt’s Solar Lights That Look Better Than Your Living Room Lamp

Posted on by

If you’ve ever walked along a riverbank at night and squinted up at a buzzing fluorescent streetlamp wondering who designed that thing and why, Munich-based duo ttal just made that question feel very urgent. Their installation Main Light, currently glowing along Frankfurt’s Weseler Werft as part of the World Design Capital Frankfurt RheinMain 2026 programme, is one of those rare projects that makes you rethink infrastructure entirely.

ttal, the design studio formed by Tobias Trübenbacher and Andreas Lang, built Main Light around a deceptively simple premise: public lighting doesn’t have to be ugly, energy-hungry, or ecologically reckless. The result is a self-sufficient solar installation that runs completely off-grid, no power lines buried underground, no permanent excavation, and no connection to the city grid whatsoever. It generates its own electricity through organic photovoltaic (OPV) solar films, those wonderfully colorful translucent panels that make the whole structure look like it belongs in a design museum rather than on a bike path. And that’s exactly the point.

Designer: Tobias Trübenbacher (ttal)

During the day, the solar surfaces catch the light and cast shifting, multicolored patterns across the riverbank. The horizontal stripes of the laminated solar cells aren’t hidden away or treated as a necessary evil. They’re the main visual event. The design essentially says: clean energy can be beautiful, and we should stop pretending otherwise. Trübenbacher, who was named Newcomer of the Year by the German Design Council at the German Design Award in 2023, has described design as a tool for social change, and Main Light reads exactly like that philosophy made physical.

The ecological thinking goes deeper than solar panels, too. Main Light only switches on when a motion sensor detects a person nearby, meaning it doesn’t flood the riverbank with unnecessary light through the night. More quietly significant is its light spectrum. The installation deliberately avoids the blue-heavy frequencies common in most modern LED street lighting, opting instead for an insect-friendly spectrum that’s gentler on nocturnal ecosystems. Light pollution is one of those invisible crises we rarely talk about loudly enough, and seeing it addressed this thoughtfully in a public installation feels quietly radical.

The structural decisions are just as considered. The foundations are reversible concrete bases that also function as urban furniture, places to sit, to pause, to look at the river. Trübenbacher and Lang worked with ewo GmbH on lighting and control technology, ASCA GmbH on the organic photovoltaic systems, and Schake GmbH on the steel construction. Four structures in total were installed near the Oosten restaurant, one large and three smaller units, running from May to November 2026.

The installation sits within a broader conversation about what public infrastructure is allowed to look like. For too long, sustainability has been sold with a kind of visual apologetics, the clunky panel, the utilitarian form, the implicit suggestion that doing the right thing means sacrificing aesthetics. Main Light refuses that trade-off. The colored OPV panels turn the energy-generation process into something visible, even celebratory, a reminder that the transition away from fossil fuels doesn’t need to be grey and joyless.

The duo is also running workshops and public events alongside the installation through the summer months, which matters. A beautiful object without discourse risks becoming wallpaper. The conversations ttal wants to start are about energy, public space, and who gets to decide what our streets look like. These aren’t niche design industry questions. They affect how livable, how safe, and how ecologically responsible our cities actually become.

Cities across Europe and beyond are already reaching out about scaling the project, and it’s easy to see why. Main Light doesn’t require the ground to be torn up. It doesn’t need a power grid. It works, it glows, and it looks genuinely gorgeous against the Frankfurt skyline. The bike paths and riverbanks of the world deserve better than what they usually get. Trübenbacher and Lang have proven, at least along one stretch of the River Main, that we’re already capable of delivering it.

The post Frankfurt’s Solar Lights That Look Better Than Your Living Room Lamp first appeared on Yanko Design.