Author Archives: Ida Torres

Vancouver’s First Supertall Was Inspired by the Ocean Floor

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Vancouver has always had good bones. The mountains, the water, the way the city sits between them like it was planned by someone with an eye for drama. But for all its natural beauty, its skyline has played it relatively safe. That’s about to change, and the agent of disruption is, of all things, a sea sponge.

Henriquez Partners Architects, a local Vancouver studio, has unveiled designs for 595 West Georgia Street, a 1,033-foot tower that will become the city’s first-ever supertall skyscraper. To earn that designation, a building has to exceed 984 feet, which puts 595 West Georgia just barely in that club and makes it a landmark before a single floor has been built. It’s the centerpiece of a larger trio called Georgia & Abbott, developed by Holborn Group, but this one is clearly the main event.

Designer: Henriquez Partners Architects

The design draws from the glass sea sponge reefs, specifically hexactinellids, found off the coast of British Columbia. These aren’t the bath sponges you’re picturing. They’re ancient, rare, deep-sea organisms with a crystalline skeletal structure that is simultaneously porous and structurally formidable. Henriquez Partners didn’t just borrow the idea aesthetically; they borrowed it structurally. The building is wrapped in a steel exoskeleton clad in white Glass Fibre Reinforced Polymer panelling, with highly translucent spans of glass filling the rest. That external framework carries the structural loads, which means fewer internal columns, more open floor plates, and a surface that looks woven and textured rather than sealed and flat.

That last distinction matters more than it sounds. Glass-box towers have dominated skylines for decades, and while some are genuinely beautiful, most are just reflective. They bounce light around and blend into each other. 595 West Georgia is going for something different: depth. The lattice of the exoskeleton creates shadows and layers depending on where you’re standing and what time of day it is. It moves, visually, in a way that most modern towers simply don’t, which makes looking at it feel more like watching a living surface than a fixed object.

Henriquez Partners described the design as telling “a story that is unique to British Columbia.” That kind of regional specificity is increasingly rare in architecture, where global firms often produce work that could exist in Dubai just as easily as Dallas. The fact that this building could only make sense in Vancouver, because the glass sponge is native to BC’s coastal waters, gives it a conceptual integrity that goes beyond branding. It’s a building that knows where it lives.

The program is equally considered. 595 West Georgia will function as a hotel tower, with conference facilities, a rooftop restaurant, and a publicly accessible observation deck at the top that will be free for Vancouverites to visit. That detail alone shifts the building’s relationship to the city. A supertall designed to be shared with the public rather than sealed off for guests feels like a genuine gesture, and it suggests that the architects and developer thought about this tower as part of the city’s fabric, not just its skyline profile.

The whole project sits at a compelling intersection of ideas. It’s biomimicry applied at an urban scale, which is a growing conversation in both design and engineering. It’s also a statement about what cities are willing to reach for, literally and figuratively. Vancouver has been measured about its height limits for years, and for good reason. The city’s low-rise character has long been part of its identity. Greenlighting a supertall signals that the city is ready to stretch those boundaries, and having one that can argue its design philosophy this clearly makes that shift feel earned.

Whether 595 West Georgia turns out to be as striking in person as the renderings suggest is something only construction can answer. But the foundational idea, that the most interesting path forward might look like something pulled from the ocean floor, is exactly the kind of thinking that makes architecture worth paying attention to right now. Not every city gets to say its most ambitious tower was modeled after an organism that’s been living quietly underwater for centuries. Vancouver gets to say that.

The post Vancouver’s First Supertall Was Inspired by the Ocean Floor first appeared on Yanko Design.

Disney and NatGeo Built Billboards That Bees Can Actually Live In

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Most billboards are built to be noticed and then forgotten. You see them, you process whatever they’re selling, and then they fade into the visual noise of the street. So when a campaign comes along that flips that formula entirely, it genuinely stops you in your tracks.

That’s exactly what’s happening in Manchester right now, where Disney and National Geographic, working with creative agency Meanwhile, have installed a series of billboards designed to do more than advertise. The structures, which the team calls “bloomboards,” are fitted with built-in cavities, textured surfaces, and planting elements that turn them into functioning habitats for bees. Not a two-week stunt. Not a PR photo op. Permanent installations, built from sustainably sourced cedar that had already been felled, placed across parks and public spaces throughout the city.

Designer: Meanwhile for Disney and National Geographic

The campaign ties to the launch of National Geographic’s Secrets of the Bees, a documentary series presented by explorer Bertie Gregory and executive produced by James Cameron. The series was filmed over several years using specialized cameras to capture bee behavior at a level of detail most of us have never seen. Entomologist Dr. Samuel Ramsey provided scientific input throughout. It’s streaming now on Disney+ and Hulu, and from a content standpoint alone, it sounds like essential viewing.

But the billboard work is where this becomes interesting as a piece of design thinking, not just marketing. Rather than placing a nature image on a billboard and calling it Earth Month, Meanwhile built the message into the medium. The physical structure becomes an argument for the cause. The billboard doesn’t just tell you bees matter; it gives them somewhere to live. Mini bee hotels have also been placed at several locations across Manchester, including Chorlton Water Park, Wythenshawe Park, Fletcher Moss Botanical Garden, and the Northern Quarter. Like the bloomboards, these aren’t decorative gestures. They’re functional, permanent additions to the urban landscape, and that distinction matters when the campaign is rooted in conservation.

Rachel Miles, creative director at Meanwhile, put it simply: “Our ambition is to encourage people to plant their own mix of shrubs and perennials to support bee populations and create a positive impact.” Michael Tsim, also a creative director at the agency, was just as direct: “Not just a two week campaign, but something they actually benefit from, permanently.”

That word, permanently, is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Environmental advertising has a long history of looking good while changing nothing. Companies run campaigns during Earth Month and then quietly move on. What makes this campaign feel different is that the outcomes are baked into the design itself. The bees don’t need to watch the documentary to benefit. The habitat exists regardless of whether anyone scans a QR code or downloads an app.

It also speaks to a broader shift in how thoughtful brands are approaching cause-driven work. The bar for audiences has risen sharply. People can spot the difference between a brand that has added a green ribbon to its logo and one that has committed real resources to a problem. Embedding a working habitat into an advertising structure is a tangible commitment, and one you can’t undo when April ends.

For anyone who follows design, this campaign is a reminder that the best work often finds its power in constraints. A billboard is a flat surface with a job to do. Meanwhile used that constraint not as a limitation but as a starting point, and the result is something genuinely unusual. Form serves function, function serves form, and both serve something beyond the campaign itself. Whether or not you plan to watch Secrets of the Bees (though I’d argue you should), the billboard project stands on its own as a piece of design worth paying attention to. It’s an example of what happens when a brief asks for more than attention and a creative team decides to take that seriously.

The post Disney and NatGeo Built Billboards That Bees Can Actually Live In first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Kids’ Phone With No Screen, No Apps, and Only $100

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The moment you see the Tin Can, you know exactly what it is and also what it isn’t. It’s a landline phone, complete with a handheld receiver and a curly cord, designed to sit on a countertop or mount on a wall. It isn’t a smartphone. It isn’t a tablet. It doesn’t have a screen. And that’s entirely the point.

Tin Can is the brainchild of three Seattle-based dads: Chet Kittleson, Max Blumen, and Graeme Davies, who created it after hitting the same wall millions of parents run into. Their kids were at that in-between age, old enough to want independence and social connection, but too young to be handed a device with unrestricted internet access. The options available were either too much or not enough. As the founders put it: “Everything out there felt like a compromise, too much tech, too much access, or just another screen to manage.” So they built something else entirely.

Designers: Chet Kittleson, Max Blumen, and Graeme Davies

The Tin Can works through Wi-Fi but without any browsing capability, social media, or texting. Children can only call and receive calls from a parent-approved list of contacts, managed through a companion app that only parents can access. Quiet hours and Do Not Disturb can be scheduled. Voicemails are supported. That’s it. That’s the whole phone. And it turns out, that’s more than enough.

From a design standpoint, the product is refreshingly considered. The cylindrical Tin Can model has a playful, almost cartoonish quality that looks deliberate rather than dated. Its colorful palette, with names like “Answer Me Aquamarine,” signals that this wasn’t designed to collect dust in a hallway. The other model, the Flashback, leans harder into nostalgia, styled after the wall-mounted phones of the 1980s and connecting via ethernet cable rather than Wi-Fi. Both feel like products made by people who actually thought about what a child’s first phone should feel like, not just what it should do.

I’ll be honest, my initial reaction to this was mild skepticism. We’ve seen “screen-free” devices for kids before, and they tend to be clunky, joyless compromises that kids tolerate for about two weeks before losing interest. Tin Can feels genuinely different. Part of that is the design, which doesn’t try to mimic a smartphone and fail. It commits fully to being a phone, a beautiful, strange little object that sits in your home and rings. Part of it is the clarity of the concept. The product makes no attempt to sneak in “just a little” content or add a casual app or two for good measure. That restraint is its biggest strength.

The market response has been telling. Since launching, Tin Can has reached users in all 50 US states and across Canada, raised $3.5 million in funding, and sold through its first batches fast enough to crash at Christmas. The founders have described the reception as overwhelming, and it’s not hard to see why. Parents have been waiting for exactly this, a middle ground between total dependence on mom’s phone and a fully connected smartphone, and no one had bothered to build it yet.

What also makes Tin Can compelling is that it re-centers something communication technologies quietly stripped away: the social ritual of calling someone. You pick up the receiver, you dial, you wait, and you talk. No typing, no video filters, no leaving someone on read. It’s a more focused, more present kind of connection, and kids who grow up with it might just develop a better instinct for actual conversation.

The Luddite movement has spent years arguing that smartphones reached kids too early and too fast. Tin Can doesn’t join that argument. It sidesteps it entirely by offering something genuinely useful, beautifully designed, and completely free of the features that make smartphones so hard to put down. Whether you call it nostalgia or just good design thinking, the result is the same: a phone worth answering.

The post The Kids’ Phone With No Screen, No Apps, and Only $100 first appeared on Yanko Design.

The World’s First T-Rex Leather Handbag Will Cost You $663,000

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Did you ever think to yourself, what if I had a bag made from an extinct million-year-old animal? I mean, people do have bags made from cows, sheep, goats, and even crocodiles, snakes, and lizards. So why not have something from a really exotic animal that doesn’t exist anymore?

Well, apparently there are people, specifically those from techwear label Enfin Levé, who did think of that and have now come up with the world’s first ever T-Rex Leather™ Handbag. And obviously, this time around, no actual animals were harmed in making this one-of-a-kind luxury handbag.

Designer: Enfin Levé

What they used to actually make the bag is lab-grown material that scientists engineered using reconstructed dinosaur collagen. They reconstructed collagen sequences from 66-million-year-old T.Rex fossils that were eventually turned into real leather and now into a luxury handbag that collectors (with money) will probably rush to add to their cabinet (and maybe not actually use). Design-wise, the bag has a sleek and angular silhouette in a striking deep teal color. There are even three decorative incisions in the design that look like dinosaur scratch marks, to add a bit of “realism” to the bag. There is also a DNA helix-styled hardware connecting the strap to the bag.

Now, what makes this more than just a wild concept is actually what went into the leather itself. The T-Rex Leather™ isn’t some glorified synthetic material trying to pass as the real thing. It was developed by three collaborators: creative agency VML, genomic engineering company The Organoid Company, and biotech pioneer Lab-Grown Leather Ltd., and the result is a material that is apparently structurally identical to traditional leather. It’s durable, biodegradable, repairable, and fully traceable. So not only are you carrying something from 66 million years ago, but you’re also carrying something that is arguably better for the planet than your average luxury leather good. No animal slaughter, no deforestation, no heavy-chemical tanning process involved. In a weird twist of fate, the most ancient leather is also the most future-forward.

Enfin Levé’s founder and lead designer, Michal Hadas, put it perfectly when he said the goal was never to force the material into “familiar codes of luxury.” Instead, he let the T-Rex leather speak for itself, figuring out where it resists, how it holds tension, and letting all of that shape the final design. Which honestly? That kind of design philosophy is exactly why this bag feels so different from anything else out there.

The bag is currently on display at the Art Zoo Museum in Amsterdam and is displayed alongside a colossal life-size T. Rex skeleton cast from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, Netherlands. It will be there until May 11, in case you’re in town. But in case you thought there would be a slew of people carrying the T-Rex bag around, there is actually only one that exists in the world. It will be auctioned off to the highest bidder with the bid starting at around $663,000.

As for whether T-Rex leather will ever make it to the mass market, don’t hold your breath just yet, but don’t completely give up hope either. The plan is to eventually make the material available to luxury brands, starting with high-end accessories before expanding into other industries like automotive. So who knows, a T-Rex leather interior in your next car might not be as far-fetched as it sounds. For now though, this bag belongs to the world of the rare and extraordinary, right where it should be. Whether you’re a serious collector, a fashion obsessive, or someone who just really, really loves dinosaurs, there’s no denying that the Enfin Levé T-Rex Leather Handbag is genuinely unlike anything that has ever existed before. And at $663,000, well, some things truly are one of a kind.

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km5’s Neon Yellow CD Player Just Made the Circuit Board the Star

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Most brands spend their entire design budget hiding what’s inside a product. km5, the Tokyo audio label that’s been quietly rewriting how people think about CD players, just did the opposite. Their latest drop, released through bPr BEAMS, puts the circuit boards, the laser mechanism, the wiring, all of it, front and center. And it looks extraordinary.

The collection introduces three new color variations: the Cp1 in Neon Yellow, the Cp2 in Clear, and the Hp1 headphones in Clear. Available starting April 1st as an exclusive pre-sale at select bPr BEAMS stores and the km5 online shop, these aren’t just color refreshes. They’re a statement about what audio design can actually look like when a brand commits to a philosophy all the way through.

Designer: km5 and bpr beams

km5’s original aesthetic has always been rooted in rigorous minimalism, the idea that a CD player should be as easy to look at as anything else in a considered space. Their Cp1 was designed like an instant photo frame, built to display the album jacket as art. Their Cp2 had the silhouette of a slim hardback, something you’d be comfortable leaving on a shelf. The Hp1 headphones weighed just 103 grams and arrived with a polished stainless steel band that belonged in a gallery as much as on a commute. The design language has always been controlled, quiet, deliberate.

This new drop takes that same discipline and applies it to a completely different tension. The concept km5 describes as pursuing a contrast between “transparent” and “neon,” a play between the mechanical cool of visible engineering and the almost aggressive energy of neon light. It’s a bold shift in mood that somehow still feels entirely on-brand.

The Cp1 in Neon Yellow is the most immediately striking. The entire frame is cast in that charged, electric green-yellow, and when you look at it, you can see every component underneath lit by the color of the shell itself. It doesn’t look like a product. It looks like something you’d find in a design museum sandwiched between an Olivetti typewriter and an early Apple prototype. The edges illuminate in a way that makes it feel alive, like it’s doing something even when it’s sitting still.

The Cp2 Clear is the one I keep coming back to, though. It’s been a long time coming, because fans of the CP series have been wanting a transparent version of the speaker-equipped Cp2 since the model launched. Now that it exists, it earns every bit of the wait. The internal structure, the laser mechanism, the circuit boards, the speaker grille, all of it sits behind the clear shell in a way that reads more like an exploded technical drawing than a consumer product. It’s serious, it’s cool, and it’s genuinely beautiful in a way that no amount of matte white plastic could replicate.

The Hp1 Clear follows the same logic. The housing is stripped back to transparent, the internals are exposed, and then the lime yellow ear pads arrive as the whole color story’s punctuation mark. It’s a contrast that shouldn’t work as well as it does. The clear mechanical housing next to those soft, textured yellow cushions is the kind of pairing that reads as both street-ready and gallery-worthy at the same time. Techwear people are going to love this. Interior people are going to love this. That’s a rare overlap.

The thing km5 keeps getting right, and this drop confirms it again, is that they understand what the people who buy beautiful objects are actually buying. It’s not just function. It’s not even just aesthetics. It’s the feeling that the people who made the thing cared. That they thought about it all the way down to the part you’d normally never see. Making the inside visible is, in some ways, the ultimate expression of that care. You have nothing to hide when everything you make is worth looking at.

The post km5’s Neon Yellow CD Player Just Made the Circuit Board the Star first appeared on Yanko Design.

LEGO Finally Gives Tintin’s Moon Rocket Its Brick-Built Moment

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The moon landing happened in 1969. Tintin got there in 1954. That’s the kind of detail that makes you stop, reconsider, and immediately want to tell someone about it. Hergé, the Belgian cartoonist behind The Adventures of Tintin, published Destination Moon and its sequel Explorers on the Moon in the early 1950s, a good fifteen years before Neil Armstrong ever set foot on the lunar surface. What makes that even more remarkable is how seriously Hergé took the science behind it. He corresponded with space experts, commissioned a physical rocket model to verify its accuracy, and drew every last detail with a level of rigor that would feel at home in an aerospace manual. The rocket he designed, that now-iconic red-and-white checkered tower, wasn’t just a narrative prop. It was a genuine vision of what a moon mission could look like, built from the best technical knowledge available at the time.

And now LEGO has turned it into 1,283 bricks. The LEGO Ideas Tintin Moon Rocket (Set #21367) is available now, priced at $159.99, and it is exactly as satisfying as you’d want it to be. Standing at 49cm tall with the red-and-white checkered pattern faithfully recreated in brick form, it works beautifully as a display piece, which is clearly the whole point. This is part of LEGO’s Ideas line, designed for adults 18 and up, and it carries that same particular energy as the Botanical Collection or the vintage typewriter set: you build it once, and then it earns a permanent spot on your shelf.

Designer: LEGO

The set includes six figures, Tintin, Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus, the twin detectives Thomson and Thompson, all in detailed space suits with helmets and oxygen tanks, plus Snowy. There’s also a removable panel on the nose cone that opens to reveal a miniature control room inside. That’s the kind of considered detail that makes a $159 price tag feel reasonable rather than indulgent.

But the more interesting story is really about the design of the rocket itself. The checkered pattern on Hergé’s original wasn’t just a visual choice. It was a functional one. The two-tone design was rooted in actual aerospace practice, used to track a rocket’s roll and rotation during launch. Hergé based the rocket’s overall silhouette on the German V-2, the most advanced rocket technology the world had seen at that point, developed under Wernher von Braun’s direction during World War II. The full-circle irony is that von Braun, the man whose V-2 work first inspired Hergé’s fictional rocket, later became NASA’s chief rocket architect and was instrumental in developing the Saturn V that carried Apollo 11 to the actual Moon. Fiction and history were chasing each other the whole time, and somehow Tintin was always a step ahead.

This is also the first LEGO Tintin set ever made, which, given how culturally massive the franchise is, feels like it took longer than it should have. Over two dozen albums, translations into dozens of languages, a presence spanning continents and generations. The set started as a fan submission from Portuguese designer Alexis Dos Santos, known online as Tkel86, who put it through the LEGO Ideas community voting process before it reached full production. That origin story is fitting. Tintin has always been driven by devotion rather than obligation.

The LEGO Ideas line has a reliable instinct for picking the right icons, and the Tintin Moon Rocket belongs here. It works on multiple levels at once: a display piece that’s genuinely beautiful, a nostalgic touchstone for anyone who grew up with the comics, and a design artifact with a richer backstory than most people expect. The checkered pattern that looks so striking on a shelf today is the same pattern that was quietly grounded in real rocket science more than seventy years ago. For anyone who appreciates when design, history, and storytelling land in the same object, this one is absolutely worth your attention.

The post LEGO Finally Gives Tintin’s Moon Rocket Its Brick-Built Moment first appeared on Yanko Design.

The 190sqm Melbourne Renovation That Didn’t Touch the Street

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Melbourne’s inner-city suburb of Abbotsford is the kind of place that makes you feel the weight of time. Its streets are lined with single-fronted worker’s cottages, row after row of modest Victorian weatherboards that have been standing since the 19th century, when industrial workers first settled around the nearby factories of Fitzroy and Collingwood. The vernacular is intact, the character deeply established. To build something new here isn’t just a design challenge. It’s a negotiation with history.

That’s what makes the Abbie Abbotsford Terrace by Eckersley Architects so worth paying attention to. Not because it breaks the rules, but precisely because it knows which ones to follow. Completed in 2021, the project began with a single-fronted worker’s cottage situated directly opposite a leafy park and asked a straightforward but deceptively difficult question: how do you expand a home that’s defined by its modesty without losing the thing that makes it meaningful? The answer Eckersley Architects arrived at is one of restraint, context, and a quiet kind of confidence that isn’t always easy to pull off.

Designer: Eckersley Architects

The approach was to preserve and restore the original cottage entirely, keeping it as the street-facing face of the home. The new addition lives at the rear, a modern single-level extension that opens generously onto a private, enclosed courtyard. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t try to compete. The original and the new sit in dialogue rather than in tension, and that matters more than it might first appear.

One of the more understated decisions in the design is how the building form was shaped by its immediate neighbours. To the north, a two-storey dwelling. To the south, a single-level home with very little outdoor space. Rather than ignoring this context, Eckersley Architects used it as a structural premise, positioning Abbie as the bridge between two opposing scales, sitting equally adjacent to both boundary walls and carefully calculated to cause minimal shadowing to the southern neighbour. It’s the kind of considered empathy that rarely gets talked about in residential architecture, but it’s exactly the sort of thinking that separates good design from great design.

The result, at 190 square metres, is a home that punches well above its footprint. The new addition features lofty ceilings and expansive windows that frame the rear courtyard. The living space feels generous without being excessive, and the courtyard itself functions as an outdoor room, extending the home’s liveable area into something that feels genuinely alive. Photography by Dan Preston captures it all with a warmth that makes you want to be there, which is the ultimate compliment to any home.

I keep thinking about why projects like this matter so much right now. We spend a lot of time talking about bold new architecture, the statement builds, the hero houses dropped onto open sites with unlimited vision and budgets to match. And those are exciting, too. But the harder, more quietly radical act is doing exactly what Eckersley Architects did here: entering an existing neighbourhood, respecting its inherited logic, and finding a way to add to it rather than override it. Abbotsford’s rows of Victorian cottages are a form of collective memory. The preservation of that streetscape, maintained by dozens of homes that all quietly hold the line, is what gives the neighbourhood its character. When a renovation like Abbie comes along and chooses to work with that, rather than against it, it earns its place.

The project was completed in 2021 and has only now landed on ArchDaily, which feels right. It was never going to make a loud entrance. It’s a house doing exactly what it needs to do without reaching for attention. The best residential architecture often works that way. It reveals itself gradually, detail by detail. Abbie Abbotsford doesn’t reimagine what a house can be. It simply becomes a very good version of what this one always had the potential to be. And sometimes, that is enough.

The post The 190sqm Melbourne Renovation That Didn’t Touch the Street first appeared on Yanko Design.

Belgium’s Most Striking Concrete Villa Was Designed by the Dunes

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If you’ve ever stood on a beach and watched the tide pull back, you know that moment right before the water retreats completely, when it leaves those delicate horizontal lines etched across wet sand. That’s what the facade of Villa Nouvelle Vague looks like. Not metaphorically. Literally. Belgian architect Magalie Munters designed the concrete surface of this seaside villa in Oostduinkerke with a horizontal grain that mirrors the striations the North Sea leaves behind at low tide. The reference isn’t decorative, it’s structural. And that distinction matters.

The villa sits on a corner plot at the edge of a protected dune reserve in Oostduinkerke, a small coastal town already known for a few wonderfully eccentric things: a ship-shaped restaurant and fishermen who harvest shrimp on horseback. Into this landscape, Munters has introduced something that manages to be arresting without being loud. The form is sculptural and unmistakably modern, but it doesn’t shout. It settles.

Designer: Magalie Munters

The name “Nouvelle Vague” borrows from the French New Wave film movement, and the reference is apt in ways that go beyond the obvious nod to style. The French New Wave was defined by breaking conventional rules while remaining deeply committed to craft. Munters is working in a similar register. For years, her Ghent-based boutique studio has been developing residential architecture with organic geometries, pushing against the idea that construction methods should set the ceiling on what architecture can achieve. “Through that ongoing research, I developed a way of building in which construction and technology no longer act as a limitation to the architecture,” she explains. Villa Nouvelle Vague is where that research cashes out.

The concrete form is completely curved across the entire volume, not just as a surface treatment but as a governing logic, carried through every detail: the absent roof edges, the curved garage opening, even the way the house integrates into the ground. The bedrooms are half-buried in the dunes, which is both a functional and a conceptual move. The house doesn’t sit on the landscape. It’s anchored into it. Above those buried rooms, the living spaces rise toward the horizon, pulling in light and opening out to views of the dunes in a way that feels earned rather than forced.

The way you move through the house is where Munters’ admiration for Le Corbusier becomes most legible. She’s spoken about his influence, specifically in “the rooftop solarium, in the way spaces expand and contract, and in the vertical shafts that structure movement through the house.” You enter through a vertical shaft that climbs toward the roof before expanding into the main living space. The compression-then-release is theatrical in the best sense. The house is working on your nervous system before you’ve even sat down.

I keep coming back to that word: deliberate. Munters uses it herself: “What might appear as a free form is in fact the result of a very deliberate construction logic.” That’s the tension the villa lives in, and frankly, it’s what makes it interesting. Nothing here is freehand improvisation. The curves look fluid because the logic behind them is airtight. The concrete looks like it grew from the dunes because the architect studied the dunes before she touched a drawing. That’s different from a building that mimics nature for aesthetic points. It’s rarer, and harder.

Belgian architecture doesn’t always get the international visibility it deserves, and Magalie Munters is one of those names worth paying attention to even if residential architecture isn’t usually your thing. Villa Nouvelle Vague is the kind of project that earns its name. It has the confidence of something that knows exactly what it is, and the intelligence not to over-explain itself. Just like the best films of the movement it references.

The post Belgium’s Most Striking Concrete Villa Was Designed by the Dunes first appeared on Yanko Design.

Belgium’s Most Striking Concrete Villa Was Designed by the Dunes

Posted on by

If you’ve ever stood on a beach and watched the tide pull back, you know that moment right before the water retreats completely, when it leaves those delicate horizontal lines etched across wet sand. That’s what the facade of Villa Nouvelle Vague looks like. Not metaphorically. Literally. Belgian architect Magalie Munters designed the concrete surface of this seaside villa in Oostduinkerke with a horizontal grain that mirrors the striations the North Sea leaves behind at low tide. The reference isn’t decorative, it’s structural. And that distinction matters.

The villa sits on a corner plot at the edge of a protected dune reserve in Oostduinkerke, a small coastal town already known for a few wonderfully eccentric things: a ship-shaped restaurant and fishermen who harvest shrimp on horseback. Into this landscape, Munters has introduced something that manages to be arresting without being loud. The form is sculptural and unmistakably modern, but it doesn’t shout. It settles.

Designer: Magalie Munters

The name “Nouvelle Vague” borrows from the French New Wave film movement, and the reference is apt in ways that go beyond the obvious nod to style. The French New Wave was defined by breaking conventional rules while remaining deeply committed to craft. Munters is working in a similar register. For years, her Ghent-based boutique studio has been developing residential architecture with organic geometries, pushing against the idea that construction methods should set the ceiling on what architecture can achieve. “Through that ongoing research, I developed a way of building in which construction and technology no longer act as a limitation to the architecture,” she explains. Villa Nouvelle Vague is where that research cashes out.

The concrete form is completely curved across the entire volume, not just as a surface treatment but as a governing logic, carried through every detail: the absent roof edges, the curved garage opening, even the way the house integrates into the ground. The bedrooms are half-buried in the dunes, which is both a functional and a conceptual move. The house doesn’t sit on the landscape. It’s anchored into it. Above those buried rooms, the living spaces rise toward the horizon, pulling in light and opening out to views of the dunes in a way that feels earned rather than forced.

The way you move through the house is where Munters’ admiration for Le Corbusier becomes most legible. She’s spoken about his influence, specifically in “the rooftop solarium, in the way spaces expand and contract, and in the vertical shafts that structure movement through the house.” You enter through a vertical shaft that climbs toward the roof before expanding into the main living space. The compression-then-release is theatrical in the best sense. The house is working on your nervous system before you’ve even sat down.

I keep coming back to that word: deliberate. Munters uses it herself: “What might appear as a free form is in fact the result of a very deliberate construction logic.” That’s the tension the villa lives in, and frankly, it’s what makes it interesting. Nothing here is freehand improvisation. The curves look fluid because the logic behind them is airtight. The concrete looks like it grew from the dunes because the architect studied the dunes before she touched a drawing. That’s different from a building that mimics nature for aesthetic points. It’s rarer, and harder.

Belgian architecture doesn’t always get the international visibility it deserves, and Magalie Munters is one of those names worth paying attention to even if residential architecture isn’t usually your thing. Villa Nouvelle Vague is the kind of project that earns its name. It has the confidence of something that knows exactly what it is, and the intelligence not to over-explain itself. Just like the best films of the movement it references.

The post Belgium’s Most Striking Concrete Villa Was Designed by the Dunes first appeared on Yanko Design.

A Bookrack That Started as a Rectangle and Refused to Stay One

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Most furniture design starts with a question about function and ends there. Deniz Aktay, the designer behind the studio @dezinobjects, apparently decided to start with geometry instead, and the result is one of the most quietly clever storage pieces I’ve come across in a while: the Barrow Bookrack.

The concept is almost laughably simple to explain, which is exactly why it works. Take a rectangle. Extend each of its lines on one side only. That’s it. That’s the whole idea. And yet, what comes out the other end of that single decision is a bookrack that feels caught mid-motion, leaning into itself, its proportions oddly satisfying in a way that’s difficult to immediately place. On paper, it barely sounds like a design at all. In person, it’s all you notice.

Designer: Deniz Aktay

Looking at it from a distance, the Barrow tilts at an angle that initially reads as precarious. It looks like it could tip at any moment, like a shelf that forgot to stand up straight. But it doesn’t. The asymmetry is intentional and controlled, and that’s exactly the kind of design choice that separates a well-considered piece from something that only looks interesting in renders. The structure holds, both physically and visually. The angular feet, the jutting top ledge, the open body sitting between them: everything is doing something.

The name is worth pausing on. A barrow, the traditional kind, is a simple carrying frame stripped back to its essential parts. Nothing extra, nothing decorative, just the minimum structure required to move something from one place to another. Aktay’s Barrow carries that same philosophy. Every extended edge and protruding surface earns its place. The result is a range of storage spots, each with its own character. Books stand upright in the central cavity. Larger volumes or stacked titles settle onto the flat extended surfaces. A magazine slipped sideways into one of the outer ledges feels like it was always meant to sit there.

This is the kind of piece that rewards being actually used. A lot of beautiful storage objects suffer from what I’d call the trophy problem: they look better empty than full. Barrow is the opposite. Load it with design books, art monographs, a worn paperback or two, and it genuinely improves. The varying heights, the mix of orientations, the textures of spines pressed against pale wood, it all adds up into something that feels lived in rather than staged. The structure becomes a frame for your reading life rather than something competing with it.

Aktay has explored this kind of thinking before. His earlier Bookgroove piece was a sculptural bookrack-table hybrid that played with the idea of furniture as form. Barrow feels like a sharper, more edited version of that same instinct: fewer moves, more precision. There’s less drama in the silhouette, but the restraint makes it more liveable. A piece like this can sit in a living room, a studio, or a bedroom and feel contextually right without demanding too much visual real estate from the room around it. It has presence without insistence, which is a harder balance to strike than it sounds.

The part that keeps pulling me back to this design is how naturally it moves from a flat idea to a physical one. The Barrow is essentially a graphic concept made tangible, a line drawing that decided to become furniture. The form evolved directly from extending lines on a flat surface before anything was actually built, and seeing that logic translated so cleanly into wood makes the whole thing click. The render and the physical piece are telling the same story, which is rarer in furniture design than it ought to be.

Furniture, at its best, makes you reconsider something you assumed was already settled. You’ve seen hundreds of bookshelves. You’ve probably owned a few. The Barrow doesn’t try to be revolutionary. It just extends a line a little further than expected, and somehow that’s enough to change the whole conversation.

The post A Bookrack That Started as a Rectangle and Refused to Stay One first appeared on Yanko Design.