This Mooncake Tin Box Turns Into A Chinese Lantern Once You’re Done Enjoying The Sweets

Posted on by

Back in the 90s, every packaging was a craft project. Milk cartons were turned into pen-stands, Pringles cans into kaleidoscopes, Coca-Cola bottles into backyard rockets… and that approach made a lot more sense than throwing packaging into the waste bin. We’d go out of our way to repurpose these objects, giving them a (sometimes unintended) second life. We don’t do that anymore because for the most part, brands don’t believe in fun packaging anymore. However, Yanlun Wu’s trying to reverse that approach.

A winner of the A’ Design Award, Wu’s packaging for traditional Chinese mooncakes looks like your standard tin box. With cultural elements evoking the beauty of the Mid-Autumn festival, this box forms an integral part of a ritualistic gifting experience, where you visit your loved ones with mooncakes, wishing them good health and prosperity. The packaging for a mooncake plays a simple dual-purpose role – it encases the cakes for safe transport, but it also serves as a visual signifier of quality – a good packaging is indicative of a well-thought gift. However, that dual-purpose role ends once the moon-cakes are consumed. Wu’s packaging, however, turns the lid of the mooncake box into a traditional paper lantern, giving it life even after you’ve consumed the dessert.

Designer: Yanlun Wu

Lanterns form an integral part of the Mid-Autumn festival too. Apart from eating mooncakes, gazing at the moon, and bonding with family, people also light paper lanterns which are either hung outside houses, or sent cascading into the sky. Wu’s design aligns with the former. Each food-safe tin box comes with a lid that has a foldable lantern pressed into it. Once you’re done with the mooncakes, simply unfold the lantern and you’ve got a traditional keepsake that allows you to enjoy Wu’s packaging well beyond its original purpose.

That’s the beauty of what Wu’s trying to achieve here – giving the package a third purpose and a second life. Each lantern comes adorned with traditional Chinese motifs that represent the Mid-Autumn festival. “This innovative dual-lifecycle design combats waste by turning disposable packaging into a lasting decorative object, seamlessly blending traditional Chinese mid-autumn symbolism with modern sustainable practice,” Wu says.

The post This Mooncake Tin Box Turns Into A Chinese Lantern Once You’re Done Enjoying The Sweets first appeared on Yanko Design.

Color Shifting Defenders with meaty power are the most unique Land Rovers on the planet

Posted on by

How far will you go to customize your favorite ride if money is not a problem? I guess we’ve just seen the pinnacle of a motorhead’s love for Defenders go absolutely wild. A fat-pocketed client had commissioned Land Rover Classic – restomod shop for customizing and restoring classic Defenders – for one of the craziest projects to date. The deal was to customize not one but four prized Defenders into the most unique off-roaders on the planet right now.

The four vehicles getting the special treatment include the Classic Defender 90 Station Wagon, the 90 Soft Top version, a 110 Station Wagon, and a 110 Double Cab Pick‑Up. The highlight of this restomod is the color-changing Spectral Green paint treatment that shifts from green to purple to gold depending on the angle at which light falls on it.

Designer: Land Rover

“The single-client commission represents the near-infinite customization possibilities that Land Rover Classic offers clients via its Works Bespoke service, including the option to specify a colour inspired by any source, including personal items, natural landscapes, or other vehicles in their collection,” says Land Rover. This client however, has gone that extra mile to ensure his quadruped Defenders are unique on the planet, as the color shifting magic extends to the 18-inch Sawtooth alloy wheels and the exterior badges. The level of personalization is apparent from the inscribed Defender on the hood and hand-painted coachline in white shade.

The paint job alone took around 400 man-hours for each of the vehicles, getting draped in the special color-changing paint, at the in-house facility. Those icy White roofs and the expedition cages contrast the look perfectly. This eye-catching treatment follows on to the interior as well, wherein the centrally located facia panel gets the color-shifting effect. This is matched with the Vanilla Bridge of Weir leather and silky green stitching. The floor mats are not ignored in any way, as they come embellished with the Superwool carpets in Bridge of Weir leather cover and the debossed Defender wordmark.

Under the hood, each one of them gets a naturally aspirated 5.0-liter V8 engine churning out 380 lb-ft of torque to match the flamboyant looks. The engine is mated to an eight-speed ZF automatic gearbox that gets all wheel drive config with a low range. Other hardware upgrades come in the form of improved dampers, springs, anti-roll bars, and the bigger disks with four-piston calipers.

Range Rover Classics has not revealed the pricing of this exorbitant package, but I’m sure it would have run in millions, given that the stock Defenders themselves start at around $264,000. That paint job and the added restomods should shoot up the final price for each by a considerable amount!

The post Color Shifting Defenders with meaty power are the most unique Land Rovers on the planet first appeared on Yanko Design.

Two Cor-Ten A-Frames Lined in Oiled Ironbark and Brass Are NSW’s Most Compelling Retreat

Posted on by

Most architects talk about restraint. Casey Brown Architecture actually practices it — and with Permanent Camping III (PC3), the Sydney-based firm delivers its most resolved chapter yet in an ongoing series rooted in the idea that shelter, stripped bare, is its own form of luxury.

PC3 sits on a working sheep farm roughly ten minutes outside the NSW regional centre of Orange. It continues a lineage that began with PC1 in Mudgee and PC2 in Berry, yet stands as its own distinctive response to place, climate, and the evolving ethos of minimal living. Each iteration has pushed further into the question of what a dwelling truly needs to be — and PC3 answers with two sharply profiled A-frame steel cabins that rest lightly on the undulating terrain, their silhouette unmistakably reminiscent of a tent pitched against the open sky.

Designer: Casey Brown Architecture

The form is both utilitarian and sculptural. Shaped by economy and climate, the cabins were designed specifically as short-stay boutique accommodation, built for reflection and direct engagement with the environment. From the outside, the structures read as hardworking — almost agricultural — with their angular steel profiles echoing the farm’s own no-fuss pragmatism. But step inside and the experience shifts entirely.

In contrast to the rustic exterior, the cabins are lined with warm boards of oiled recycled ironbark, bespoke brass lighting, and custom steel detailing — a considered interior palette that feels earned rather than decorative. It’s the tension between outside and inside, between roughness and warmth, that gives PC3 its emotional resonance. Casey Brown Architecture has always understood that the best retreats don’t shield you from the landscape — they frame it.

The project is described as a distilled version of habitation, providing only what is essential for comfort, with the two cabins designed to encourage reflection and allow direct engagement with the surroundings. That philosophy isn’t new to this practice, but PC3 refines it with a maturity that comes from having done this before — and asking harder questions each time.

What makes PC3 significant isn’t novelty. It’s conviction. In an era of maximalist rural retreats competing for attention, these two A-frames on an Orange sheep farm quietly insist that architecture doesn’t need to perform. It needs to be present — grounded, purposeful, and honest about the land it sits on. Casey Brown Architecture has spent decades making that argument. With PC3, they make it again, and more convincingly than ever.

The post Two Cor-Ten A-Frames Lined in Oiled Ironbark and Brass Are NSW’s Most Compelling Retreat first appeared on Yanko Design.

LAYER Just Made a 65W Charger You’d Actually Want on Your Desk

Posted on by

At some point, most of us stopped caring what our charging setup looks like. A tangle of cables here, a plastic brick there, maybe a few adapters scattered across the desk like tech confetti. It works, so why fuss? London-based design studio LAYER is making the case that we’ve been setting the bar way too low, and once you see Node and Loft, it’s pretty hard to disagree.

LAYER, the studio founded by award-winning British designer Benjamin Hubert, recently unveiled Node and Loft, a new family of charging products developed for lifestyle brand Daily Objects. The premise is simple but smart: what if your charging accessories actually looked like something you chose on purpose?

Designer: LAYER

Node is the modular piece of the duo, and it’s genuinely clever. Built around a one-wire setup, it works as either a 2-in-1 or 3-in-1 dock, with four interchangeable modules to mix and match: a Wireless Charging Phone Stand, a Wireless Charging Disk, an Apple Watch Charging Stand, and a Portable Lamp. Each module clicks in when you need it at the desk and lifts off just as easily when you’re heading into a different room or packing a bag. The whole thing feels less like cable management and more like a system you’d actually enjoy using.

Loft, the other half of the collection, is a 65W charging station designed to sit on your desk without apology. It handles up to four devices at once, mains and USB-C included, all packed into a compact, sculptural form that looks far more intentional than what most charging stations have to offer. The silhouette is arched and minimal. The materials feel considered. It’s the kind of object you leave out because you want to, not because you forgot to tidy it away.

What LAYER has done here, and what makes this more than just another tech accessory launch, is commit fully to a design language rather than just a functional brief. Soft forms, arched silhouettes, tactile materials, a recurring circular charging motif: it all adds up to something cohesive. The goal isn’t just to make charging look prettier. It’s to make it feel like part of how you live, whether at a home desk, in a hotel room, or on a kitchen counter.

Hubert described charging as “one of the most repeated interactions in daily life, yet the products that enable it are often treated as background objects.” That observation is so obvious you’d think more designers would have acted on it sooner. The ugly charging block has been a design blind spot for years, and the solutions that have come before Node and Loft have largely fallen into two camps: clinical and all-white, or trying so hard to look “lifestyle” that they end up feeling performative. Node and Loft feel like neither. They feel like objects with actual personality.

For Daily Objects, an Indian lifestyle brand that’s been steadily building a reputation for design-forward tech accessories, collaborating with LAYER on this makes a lot of sense. The studio is known for a philosophy rooted in what Hubert calls humanising technology, taking things that usually feel cold or utilitarian and giving them warmth and presence. That’s a harder balance to strike than it sounds, especially in a category as commoditised as charging hardware. It’s a thread that runs consistently through LAYER’s work, and it’s very visible here.

The broader trend Node and Loft belong to is worth paying attention to. We’re moving away from the idea that tech accessories have to look like tech accessories. People are putting more thought into how objects feel in a space, not just how they function in one. The line between product design and interior design keeps getting blurrier, and collections like this one are a big reason why.

You probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about where your charger lives on your desk. Node and Loft are betting that, given the right option, you might start.

The post LAYER Just Made a 65W Charger You’d Actually Want on Your Desk first appeared on Yanko Design.