Tag Archives: Chair

Thin Acrylic Folds Like Origami to Give This Chair Its Inflated, Sculptural Form

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A folding chair is usually designed around one simple promise: disappear when it is not needed. This concept takes that familiar piece of furniture in a more expressive direction. Instead of treating folding purely as a practical mechanism, the chair turns the act of folding into its defining visual language. The result feels somewhere between an origami object, an inflated form, and a piece of transparent sculpture.

 

Its shape begins with an interesting contradiction. Acrylic is naturally thin and rigid, yet the chair appears soft, rounded, and almost inflated. The designer draws inspiration from origami and balloons, two references that create volume from something initially flat. Thin acrylic sheets are folded into pronounced curves, producing the appearance of substantial thickness without relying on a heavy solid mass. Visually, the chair feels generous and substantial, while the construction helps reduce some of the weight typically associated with acrylic furniture of a similar perceived volume.

 

Designer: Jihong Lee

 

 

There is something especially appealing about the way the material is treated. Acrylic is often associated with crisp edges, polished surfaces, and a certain visual coldness. Here, those expectations are disrupted by broad curls and smooth transitions. The chair is hard to the touch, but its silhouette suggests softness. Its curved surfaces resemble something closer to pudding or a slowly inflated form than a conventional rigid seat. That mismatch between what the eye expects and what the material actually feels like gives the design much of its personality. It almost invites you to reach out and touch it simply to understand what you are looking at.

 

The construction is equally considered. The folded acrylic sits over a structured chair leg system and can be fixed in place without additional bolt assembly or bonding. This allows the material itself to take on a structural role while keeping the overall appearance clean. There are fewer visible interruptions, so the chair reads as a continuous form rather than a collection of assembled components.

 

 

Its flat-packed nature adds another layer to the idea. Folding becomes more than a visual gesture. It becomes part of how the chair can be transported, assembled, and understood. There is a satisfying DIY quality to the process, almost like completing a large piece of origami and watching a usable object emerge from a flat sheet. That sense of participation makes the chair feel approachable despite its sculptural appearance.

This is what gives the design its charm. It does not hide the logic behind its construction. The folds are visible, understandable, and central to its character. There is an immediacy to that simplicity. You can look at the chair and begin to imagine how it came together.

As an object in a room, it would easily become a focal point. Its transparent material keeps it visually light, while the exaggerated curves give it enough presence to shift the atmosphere of a space. It feels playful without becoming novelty furniture, and experimental without losing its function as a chair.

The strongest idea is ultimately quite simple: take a thin, rigid sheet and make it feel full, soft, and substantial through folding alone. In doing so, the chair turns a familiar material into something unexpectedly tactile and expressive. It brings the pleasure of making, folding, and assembling into furniture design, giving the finished object the curious charm of something that looks as enjoyable to build as it is to live with.

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The 8kg Spider Chair That Refuses to Wobble on Any Floor

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I have spent enough time in enough apartments with enough uneven floors to know that four legs are a promise most chairs cannot keep. Old buildings settle, floorboards cup, tile grout dips half a millimeter here and there, and a standard four-legged chair ends up rocking under you at the worst possible moment, usually right as you lean back with a full glass in hand. It is a small annoyance, but it is the kind of small annoyance that designers have somehow never bothered to fix, because four legs is what a chair is supposed to have.

A Russian workshop called alter ST. decided the fix was to stop pretending four points of contact make sense on a surface that is never actually flat. Their piece, called Spider, uses three legs instead. Three points always define a single plane, so the chair cannot rock no matter what the floor is doing underneath it. The name comes from how the legs move. Each one is a flat steel bar that breaks at a pivot joint and swings outward like an insect’s leg, and the whole thing reads less like furniture standing at attention and more like something that has quietly decided to crouch where it landed.

Designer: Alexander Ivanov (alter ST.)

What I like about this piece is that it does not try to hide its own engineering. So much furniture design spends its energy disguising the joints, tucking screws under upholstery, sanding away any evidence that the object was assembled rather than grown. Spider does the opposite. The round lugs, the axles, the countersunk hex fixings, all of it is left exposed on purpose, because that hardware is not decoration bolted onto a hidden frame. It is the frame. Take those pieces away and the chair has nothing left to stand on. I find that kind of honesty rare in a category that usually prefers illusion.

The seat is a soft rounded-triangle cushion in black leather with a stitched welt, and the backrest is a separate leather pad mounted at shoulder-blade height on its own stem, positioned for a low lounge conversation rather than a desk session. Both the seat and the back can be removed and reupholstered without touching the steel frame underneath, which means the chair does not need to be replaced just because the leather eventually wears through. That is a detail people rarely notice when they buy furniture and almost always wish they had once a cushion starts cracking five years in.

The finish work is where the piece earns its second look. The steel carries a 4N satin finish, brushed in a single direction, and it hides fingerprints far better than a polished surface would, which matters on something meant to be touched constantly while you talk with a coffee in hand. For anyone who wants a different mood, the frame can be polished to a mirror or powder-coated in any RAL color, so the same silhouette can go from industrial gray to something closer to a lacquered accent piece.

None of this makes Spider a practical everyday chair in the way a dining chair or an office chair needs to be practical. At 700 by 680 by 760 millimeters and eight kilograms, it is light enough to move around a room, but it is clearly built for a corner, a reading nook, a spot next to a window where one person sits with a drink and maybe a book. I do not think that is a flaw. Not every object in a home needs to justify itself through utility, and a chair that never wobbles, never hides its own skeleton, and never asks you to compromise the leather for the steel or the steel for the leather feels like it earned its spot regardless of how often it gets sat in.

alter ST. builds Spider and its other pieces out of a small shop in Aleksandrov, cutting, bending, welding, and finishing everything under one roof rather than farming the work out. That kind of small-batch production is not going to compete with mass furniture on price, but it explains why a chair this specific, this stubborn about solving one particular floor problem, exists at all. Somebody had to care enough about a wobble to redesign the entire leg.

The post The 8kg Spider Chair That Refuses to Wobble on Any Floor first appeared on Yanko Design.

The 8kg Spider Chair That Refuses to Wobble on Any Floor

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I have spent enough time in enough apartments with enough uneven floors to know that four legs are a promise most chairs cannot keep. Old buildings settle, floorboards cup, tile grout dips half a millimeter here and there, and a standard four-legged chair ends up rocking under you at the worst possible moment, usually right as you lean back with a full glass in hand. It is a small annoyance, but it is the kind of small annoyance that designers have somehow never bothered to fix, because four legs is what a chair is supposed to have.

A Russian workshop called alter ST. decided the fix was to stop pretending four points of contact make sense on a surface that is never actually flat. Their piece, called Spider, uses three legs instead. Three points always define a single plane, so the chair cannot rock no matter what the floor is doing underneath it. The name comes from how the legs move. Each one is a flat steel bar that breaks at a pivot joint and swings outward like an insect’s leg, and the whole thing reads less like furniture standing at attention and more like something that has quietly decided to crouch where it landed.

Designer: Alexander Ivanov (alter ST.)

What I like about this piece is that it does not try to hide its own engineering. So much furniture design spends its energy disguising the joints, tucking screws under upholstery, sanding away any evidence that the object was assembled rather than grown. Spider does the opposite. The round lugs, the axles, the countersunk hex fixings, all of it is left exposed on purpose, because that hardware is not decoration bolted onto a hidden frame. It is the frame. Take those pieces away and the chair has nothing left to stand on. I find that kind of honesty rare in a category that usually prefers illusion.

The seat is a soft rounded-triangle cushion in black leather with a stitched welt, and the backrest is a separate leather pad mounted at shoulder-blade height on its own stem, positioned for a low lounge conversation rather than a desk session. Both the seat and the back can be removed and reupholstered without touching the steel frame underneath, which means the chair does not need to be replaced just because the leather eventually wears through. That is a detail people rarely notice when they buy furniture and almost always wish they had once a cushion starts cracking five years in.

The finish work is where the piece earns its second look. The steel carries a 4N satin finish, brushed in a single direction, and it hides fingerprints far better than a polished surface would, which matters on something meant to be touched constantly while you talk with a coffee in hand. For anyone who wants a different mood, the frame can be polished to a mirror or powder-coated in any RAL color, so the same silhouette can go from industrial gray to something closer to a lacquered accent piece.

None of this makes Spider a practical everyday chair in the way a dining chair or an office chair needs to be practical. At 700 by 680 by 760 millimeters and eight kilograms, it is light enough to move around a room, but it is clearly built for a corner, a reading nook, a spot next to a window where one person sits with a drink and maybe a book. I do not think that is a flaw. Not every object in a home needs to justify itself through utility, and a chair that never wobbles, never hides its own skeleton, and never asks you to compromise the leather for the steel or the steel for the leather feels like it earned its spot regardless of how often it gets sat in.

alter ST. builds Spider and its other pieces out of a small shop in Aleksandrov, cutting, bending, welding, and finishing everything under one roof rather than farming the work out. That kind of small-batch production is not going to compete with mass furniture on price, but it explains why a chair this specific, this stubborn about solving one particular floor problem, exists at all. Somebody had to care enough about a wobble to redesign the entire leg.

The post The 8kg Spider Chair That Refuses to Wobble on Any Floor first appeared on Yanko Design.

Yinka Ilori Finally Told the Story of Chairs Nobody Wanted

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Every neighborhood has that curb. The one where a slightly wobbly dining chair or a stained armchair shows up on trash day, waiting for someone to either haul it to the dump or grab it before the truck does. Most of us walk past. We’ve been trained to see secondhand furniture as a problem to solve quickly, not a story worth keeping. That instinct, to discard first and ask questions never, is exactly what London-based designer Yinka Ilori has spent more than a decade pushing back against.

His new book, “Chairman,” published by ORO Editions, is the first to focus entirely on the furniture that made him famous: chairs he’s rescued from charity shops and street corners across London, then transformed with color, pattern, and a little bit of mischief. At 120 pages, it traces over ten years of work through what he calls vessels of memory, migration, and identity, three words that sound academic until you actually look at what he’s built. As Ilori puts it, chairs were his first design love because of the stories they carry, and that single line explains his career better than any curator’s essay could.

Designer: Yinka Ilori

I like that the book doesn’t pretend the chairs are just chairs. Ilori has said that vintage furniture holds “personal stories, secrets, emotions, and sentiments,” and in his British-Nigerian household, offering someone your chair was never a small gesture. It meant you were inviting them into your life, your gossip, your grief. That idea shows up again and again in his work, most memorably in his 2015 show “If Chairs Could Talk,” where he named restored pieces after childhood friends from his neighborhood, some who went on to do well, others who didn’t. The point wasn’t to rank them. It was to remind people that judging a chair, or a person, by its current condition tells you nothing about where it’s been.

That’s the part of Ilori’s practice I find genuinely refreshing in a design landscape that often treats furniture as either disposable or precious, with nothing in between. He’s neither flipping thrift store finds for profit nor placing them behind museum glass. He’s giving them jobs to do again, usually with a candle holder tucked into a backrest or a plant shelf built into an armrest, details that are playful without being gimmicky.

We have our own complicated relationship with secondhand furniture. We love a good flea market flip on television, but we also replace couches the way we replace phones, and curbside “free” piles rarely stay put for long before someone tosses them for good anyway. Ilori’s approach, sourcing directly from charity shops rather than manufacturing new pieces from scratch, quietly argues for a slower, more attached way of living with objects. He’s not lecturing anyone about sustainability. He’s just showing what happens when you actually look at a chair before deciding it’s garbage.

The book also situates his chair work inside a wider circle of artists and designers, which feels right, because Ilori has never worked in isolation the way some monograph subjects like to pretend they have. One section, drawn from his “There Is Good in All of Us” collection, makes that point almost too plainly, turning cast-off seating into small monuments to second chances. His path from upcycling furniture in 2011 to large public commissions, like the Colour Palace at Dulwich Picture Gallery or his Adidas collaboration, started with exactly this kind of hands-on, unglamorous restoration work. “Chairman” makes the case that the chairs weren’t a warm-up act before the bigger projects. They were always the main story.

What stays with me most is how simple the underlying belief actually is. Ilori isn’t claiming that every discarded object deserves a second act. He’s pointing out that most of them never get the chance to prove whether they do. Design so often chases what’s new, but “Chairman” quietly argues for paying attention to what’s already here, sitting in a corner somewhere, waiting for someone to notice it hasn’t finished its story yet.

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The Aluminium Chair With No Cushion, No Frame, No Apologies

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Most furniture design tells a story in layers. A frame, a cushion, an upholstery, a finish. By the time you sit down, you’re resting on a series of decisions stacked on top of each other, most of which you’ll never see. The 010 Lounge Chair by Athens-based OFAA does the opposite. It peels back every assumption about what a chair is supposed to be and hands you 5 mm of folded aluminium instead. That sounds cold. I know it does. And maybe that’s the point.

OFAA is a design practice founded by Christos Kalientzidis in Athens, Greece. The studio works primarily with stainless steel and aluminium, and its guiding philosophy is almost refreshingly blunt: the construction stays visible. Every joint, every fold, every structural decision is left exposed because it is the design. Nothing is concealed to make you feel more comfortable about how the thing was made. That kind of transparency is rarer in furniture than it should be.

Designer: OFAA

The 010 is a lounge chair in the most technical sense. It measures 800 × 500 × 600 mm and sits low to the ground with a wide, reclined geometry that reads as genuinely inviting. But it’s the material economy of the piece that stops you. Every element, the seat, the back, the sides, the structure, is formed from the same sheets of folded 5 mm aluminium. The same material that holds the chair together also holds you. There is no secondary skeleton hiding underneath. No hidden mechanism. Just geometry doing the work.

The circular cutouts on the sides deserve a moment. They punch clean through the aluminium panels, breaking what would otherwise be an imposing, closed form into something lighter and more considered. From certain angles, they frame the space behind them like a porthole onto the room, casting perfect circular shadows that shift with the light. They’re not decorative in a frivolous sense. They’re calculated. Structurally, they reduce weight. Visually, they introduce a softness into a piece that could have easily felt rigid and forbidding. It’s the kind of design decision that looks simple and isn’t.

I’ll be honest about the comfort question, because it’s the one most people will ask. A flat aluminium seat is a hard sell. We are conditioned to expect padding, to expect a chair to meet us halfway, to cushion the difference between our bodies and the material. The 010 doesn’t do that. It asks you to trust the geometry instead, and that’s genuinely a different kind of invitation. Whether you accept it depends a lot on how you feel about design that prioritises rigour over softness. Personally, I find it compelling. Not because comfort is irrelevant, but because the idea that a single folded sheet can achieve both structural integrity and a seating function through precision alone is a design argument worth sitting with.

It also photographs beautifully in a specific, almost severe way. The images of the 010 in a dark studio setting, lit to emphasise its planes and shadows, feel more like architectural photography than furniture photography. That contrast is actually very telling. The chair has the kind of presence that makes a room look intentional simply by being in it. That’s not easy to manufacture.

What Kalientzidis and OFAA are doing with this piece fits into a broader conversation happening right now in contemporary design: one about material honesty, about stripping back excess, about whether the most sustainable design is sometimes the one made from the least. The 010 is a persuasive contribution to that conversation. It doesn’t moralize or lecture. It just shows up as a folded piece of metal and asks you to reconsider what a lounge chair can actually be.

Whether it ends up being comfortable enough for a long Saturday afternoon is, I suppose, a question for someone lucky enough to sit in one. Until then, the photographs are doing more than enough to make the argument.

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The Navy Chair That Refused to Be Replaced

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The Emeco Navy Officer Swivel Chair walked into the present carrying about 75 years of history on its brushed aluminum frame. That kind of backstory could easily become a liability for a piece of furniture. Heavy with nostalgia, locked into a moment, impossible to separate from its origins. But in the hands of Jasper Morrison, that history became the entire point.

The original Navy Officer Chair appeared in 1948, and the reason it exists is genuinely worth knowing. When US Navy officers were being redeployed from warships to land-based facilities, the standard-issue 1006 Navy Chair no longer fit the context. Officers wanted something with more comfort and ease. So Emeco, the Pennsylvania-based manufacturer already producing those iconic military chairs, made one a bit bigger, a bit softer. It worked. It lasted. And now, more than seven decades later, it’s still here.

Designer: Jasper Morrison

Jasper Morrison updated the collection and gave it new life, bringing it into the present without disconnecting it from what made it durable in the first place. Morrison is the British designer known for his “Super Normal” philosophy, a concept he developed alongside Naoto Fukasawa that argues the best objects are the ones that don’t demand attention. Not invisible, but not performative either. He’s described the role of the designer as being not to invent form but to adapt objects “through hard analysis, or, more satisfyingly, intuition and chance.” The Navy Officer chair is a clean example of that thinking applied to something with real bones.

The Emeco-Morrison collaboration has a particular origin worth knowing. Emeco’s CEO Gregg Buchbinder first encountered Morrison’s “Super Normal” exhibition in Tokyo and recognized something in the philosophy that matched what his company had been quietly doing for decades. The partnership produced the 1 Inch, Alfi, and eventually the full Navy Officer range, all built around what both parties describe as a shared appreciation for “the invisible qualities of simplicity.” That phrase is doing a lot of work, and it earns it.

The Navy Officer Swivel Chair in hand-brushed aluminum with Kvadrat Hallingdal upholstery is the specific version that keeps pulling me back. The aluminum frame is 80% recycled material, built by hand in Hanover, Pennsylvania, through a 77-step manufacturing process that Emeco has been refining since the company launched in 1944. The Hallingdal textile is one of Kvadrat’s most enduring fabrics, valued for its texture and longevity. Together, these materials don’t compete with each other. They simply coexist, which is harder to achieve than it sounds.

My honest take is that this is the kind of chair that makes a lot of contemporary furniture look a little anxious by comparison. The industry has been running hard at curves, maximalist color, and statement-making proportions for the past few years, and watching some of that work age in real time is not always flattering. The Navy Officer just sits there, doing what a chair should do, looking like it will still be doing the same thing in another 75 years. That isn’t restraint for its own sake. That’s confidence.

Morrison has talked about his admiration for anonymous objects, the ones “free of their author’s ego.” The irony is that he’s one of the most recognized designers alive, but you can feel that impulse in the Navy Officer anyway. The hand-brushed finish doesn’t perform. The silhouette is familiar without being derivative. The five-star swivel base and the upholstered seat and back simply take care of the person using them. It’s furniture that has decided it doesn’t need to be the most interesting thing in the room.

Emeco backs the aluminum frame with a lifetime warranty. Given that the original design has already cleared 75 years, that feels less like a product promise and more like a reasonable assessment of the math. Some objects earn their place in a room. The Navy Officer Swivel Chair has been earning it since long before most of us had anything to say about it.

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Chrome Spheres Are Now Furniture, and It’s Surprisingly Beautiful

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The easiest way to describe the Wishes Collection is to say it looks like someone took a string of chrome Christmas ornaments and turned them into furniture. But that description undersells it considerably.

Designed by Reza Raeisifar in collaboration with Saber Abar, the Wishes Collection is a limited-edition furniture and lighting series built around a single, almost stubborn idea: take one spherical module, connect it to another, and keep going until you have a chair. Or a rocking chair. Or a bench, a table, a lamp, or a pet house. The collection includes all of these, and the remarkable thing is that they all feel like they genuinely belong together, not as a marketing decision, but as a structural one. Literally, visually, and materially.

Designers: Reza Raeisifar, Saber Abar

The concept draws from how nature builds complexity. Think coral reefs, honeycomb, bone structure. Raeisifar and Abar were inspired by the way intricate forms emerge from the patient repetition of simple elements, and they made that principle the backbone of everything here. It is a surprisingly old idea to apply to contemporary furniture design, but that is part of what makes the execution feel considered rather than gimmicky. Each piece is constructed from interconnected spherical modules in Grade 404 stainless steel with a nickel-chrome finish. The result reads as opulent without being overwrought, sculptural without needing to announce itself.

The rocking chair is where the collection’s internal logic gets genuinely interesting. On paper, chrome steel spheres and a piece of furniture meant to sway gently do not sound like natural partners. The spheres carry an obvious rigidity, an almost architectural seriousness. But paired with curved wooden runners beneath and a soft cushion on top, the chair pulls off a kind of material negotiation that should not work as well as it does. You see the tension and it reads as deliberate. It is.

The bench and chair follow the same logic. Polished steel spheres form the body, a cushion in red or velvet sits on top, and the whole thing manages to look both industrial and inviting at the same time. It is the kind of furniture that makes you want to sit in it before you even think to ask whether it is actually comfortable. For a limited-edition piece, that is exactly the instinct you want to provoke.

Then there is the pet home, which is either the collection’s best joke or its most earnest moment, depending on how you look at it. The same modular sphere system that supports a grown adult on the rocking chair now forms a miniature shelter for a cat, a cat that, in the campaign images, looks perfectly unbothered living inside polished chrome walls. The designers describe it as the architectural boundary element now forming a miniature interior of its own, and while that framing reads a bit grand for a cat house, they are not entirely wrong. The logic holds, and it lands.

The floor lamp completes the picture by pushing the modular system beyond furniture altogether. Here, the spheres are no longer bearing weight or defining form. They are catching light, letting it fracture across their polished surfaces in ways that feel more jewel-like than industrial. It is a smart shift in function, and it shows how far a single design language can travel when the designers trust it enough to keep pushing rather than introducing something entirely new.

Raeisifar and Abar have tied the collection’s name to a metaphor. A wish, they suggest, takes shape through many small actions over time. One modest step, repeated often enough, eventually becomes something whole. The Wishes Collection makes that idea physical, and it works. Not because the metaphor is particularly new, but because the execution is committed enough to make you believe it.

For a limited-edition collection, Wishes does what the best ones do. It does not just sell you an object. It sells you on a way of thinking about design. And given how much of the current design conversation rewards loudness and novelty at almost any cost, a collection this disciplined, this committed to a single shape, feels more interesting, not less.

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The Modular Chair That Lets You Swap Parts Like a Building

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Most furniture asks one question at the point of purchase: do you like it enough to live with it, possibly forever? Junha Kahm’s Facade modular chair asks something different. It asks what you want from it right now, with the understanding that the answer is allowed to change.

The design breaks down into two primary systems: a stainless steel tube frame built on a 1:2 proportion ratio, and eight symmetrical PETG panels that clip into it. That proportion isn’t arbitrary. It gives the chair a visual discipline that reads immediately as intentional, a grid logic that references the structural composition of industrial architecture without cosplaying as a building. The frame is the constant. The panels are the conversation.

Designer: Junha Kahm

Each of those eight panels is identical in its symmetry, meaning the A and B parts mirror each other across both the seat and backrest. This is smart, deliberate engineering. Symmetrical components reduce manufacturing complexity and make component replacement genuinely practical rather than a design promise that falls apart the moment you try to source a spare. The panels attach to the frame via bolts and threaded inserts, making disassembly straightforward rather than surgical. The whole chair breaks down into components that, notably, fit inside a standard shopping basket. Kahm included that image in the project, and it lands as both a practical statement and a quiet joke at the expense of furniture that makes you feel like you need a logistics team to move it.

The joints connecting the stainless steel tubes deserve particular attention. Made from PETG in a rounded elbow form, they’re molded in white and sit at the intersections of the frame with a deliberate softness that contrasts cleanly against the brushed metal tubes. The angles are precise: 14 degrees at the rear leg splay, with 3 and 8 degree variations at other connection points. These aren’t decorative choices. They give the chair stability and a subtle forward lean that makes the silhouette feel considered rather than rigid.

The panel material opens the design up in a direction that’s genuinely interesting. PETG is semi-rigid, lightweight, and takes color well, which is where the CMF possibilities come in. The translucent versions let the stainless frame read through the surface, keeping the chair visually light. The opaque panels, seen in white and amber orange across different configurations, shift the chair’s entire personality. In orange, sitting against warm light, the Facade looks like something from a terrace in the south of France. In white, it’s crisp and minimal, closer to a studio or a modern dining room. Same chair. Different skin. That’s the point, and Kahm communicates it with a tagline in the project’s moodboard that cuts straight to it: “one point. sixteen panels. infinite facades.”

The architectural reference holds up because Kahm doesn’t use it superficially. Building facades serve real functional purposes: they regulate the relationship between structure and environment, they’re the part of a building most exposed to change and weathering, and on good buildings, they can be updated without touching the core structure. The Facade chair operates on the same logic. The frame is the architecture. The panels are the cladding. If one gets damaged, scratched, or simply becomes the wrong color for the room it’s in, you replace the panel, not the chair.

That reframing matters. The sustainability conversation in furniture design has leaned heavily on material sourcing, which is important, but it often ignores the simpler question of longevity through repairability. The Facade doesn’t require you to care deeply about sustainability to benefit from its approach. You just have to occasionally want things to look different, and most of us do. The clean grid composition keeps all of this from feeling overwrought. The Facade doesn’t announce itself. It sits quietly, reads as a well-proportioned chair, and holds its adaptability as a structural fact rather than a selling point worn on its sleeve. That restraint is, in its own way, the strongest part of the design.

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These Contemporary Chairs Turn Sustainability and Stillness Into Design

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A chair can be a surprisingly effective storytelling device. Give it a different material, soften a familiar silhouette, or borrow a gesture from somewhere unexpected, and suddenly it becomes more than somewhere to sit. Jaro Kose’s CUT and ZEN chairs approach that idea from two very different directions: one gives discarded material a second life, while the other translates the meditative landscape of a Japanese Zen garden into an upholstered form.

CUT is, at first glance, a fairly restrained wooden chair. Its clean oak frame, gently rounded proportions and broad backrest give it the familiarity of a classic dining chair, while its stackable construction makes it practical enough for both residential and public environments. The design also extends into upholstered and high-chair variations without losing the clarity of the original silhouette. But one version of CUT changes the story through material alone.

Designer: Jaro Kose

 

Sustainability plays an important role in Kose’s design approach, particularly in considering how materials are sourced, used and eventually given another life. Reflecting the client’s own commitment to sustainability, a version of CUT replaces the conventional seat and backrest with components made from recycled plastic.

Instead of disguising the material’s previous life, the chair celebrates it. The recycled surface has a visibly speckled texture, almost terrazzo-like from a distance, creating a sharp contrast against the quieter wooden frame. The project explores several possible recycled finishes, turning what could have been treated purely as an environmental choice into part of the chair’s visual character.

There is something appealing about that transformation. A material once categorized as waste returns as the element that gives the chair its personality. Sustainability here is not added as a label after the design is finished; it becomes visible in the object itself. CUT suggests that responsible material choices do not necessarily have to make furniture feel overtly ecological or compromise a refined interior aesthetic. Waste can simply become another raw material to design with.

ZEN moves in almost the opposite direction. Instead of beginning with a material question, the armchair begins with a feeling.

Its inspiration comes from Japanese Zen gardens, spaces historically associated with meditation and contemplation. Their carefully positioned stones and raked gravel create compositions that feel almost motionless while still suggesting movement. Kose translates that relationship into a chair designed around softness, stillness and visual calm.

The connection is immediately recognizable. The generous upholstered seat resembles a smooth stone, except here the expected hardness has been replaced with foam and fabric. Behind it, a series of rounded concentric forms creates the backrest, echoing the repetitive lines drawn through gravel around rocks in a Zen garden.

It is a wonderfully literal reference without becoming novelty furniture. The chair still reads clearly as a contemporary lounge piece, but once you understand the inspiration, the relationship between every element becomes obvious. The seat becomes the stone; the backrest becomes the energy radiating around it.

That softness also gives ZEN an interesting presence within an interior. Fully upholstered furniture is already common in contemporary residential spaces, so the material itself allows the chair to blend naturally into its surroundings. Its unusually rounded proportions and graphic backrest, however, make sure it never completely disappears.

CUT and ZEN ultimately tell two stories about contemporary living. CUT asks what happens when designers reconsider the materials we have already used, while ZEN looks at how furniture can encourage a different relationship with our surroundings and ourselves. One gives waste another life. The other turns a meditative landscape into something you can sink into. And both show how a relatively simple chair can carry a surprisingly rich idea.

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4 Ancient Japanese Crafts Reborn as Furniture You Can Actually Own

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Japan has always had a complicated relationship with the new. On one hand, the country gave us bullet trains, robot hotels, and vending machines that sell everything from hot soup to umbrellas. On the other hand, it is also home to some of the world’s most painstakingly preserved craft traditions, techniques passed down through generations with almost stubborn devotion. What Kyoto-based designer Kenta Yoshizawa has done with his Red Craft collection, known in Japanese as Akai Kogei, is sit right in the middle of that tension and make it look beautiful.

The collection pulls from four traditional Japanese craft practices: bamboo fencing, kumihimo braided cord, washi paper, and urushi lacquer. These are not fringe techniques or obscure hobbies. Kumihimo dates back centuries and was once used to lace samurai armor. Urushi lacquer has been found on artifacts over 9,000 years old. Washi paper holds UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage status. Yoshizawa is not working with forgotten relics. He is working with the spine of Japanese material culture, and the result is a set of objects that feel both deeply rooted and genuinely fresh.

Designer: Kenta Yoshizawa

Each piece in the collection has a name that reflects its origins without being heavy-handed about it. The “n shelf” is a leaning shelf that takes the n-shaped profile of a Sodegaki, a traditional bamboo screen, and translates it into a freestanding furniture piece. The bamboo is shaped by hand using a gas burner to heat and bend the material, a process that is as physical and present as any studio practice can get. It is not mimicking the past. It is using the past as a blueprint, then deciding where to go from there.

The kumino piece works with braided cord in a way that makes you see kumihimo differently, less as decoration and more as structure with genuine weight and tension. The stickstick and usahako round out the series, incorporating washi paper and urushi lacquer into objects designed for everyday domestic use. All four pieces share the same vibrant red palette, which is both a visual signature and a quiet conceptual statement. Red in Japan carries layered meaning, connected to protection, vitality, and ceremony. Painting an entire collection in it is not an accident.

To pull this off with integrity, Yoshizawa worked with actual craft specialists, including Nagaoka Meichiku for the bamboo shelf and Shoen Kumihimo for the braided cord work. That collaboration matters more than it might seem. So much design that attempts to “revive” traditional craft ends up looking like a tribute act, aesthetically referencing a process without truly engaging with it. Having the masters involved, having people who have spent their lives learning these techniques actually make the objects, keeps Red Craft honest. The craft is not a veneer. It is the point.

My honest take is that Red Craft is exactly the kind of design we need more of right now. Not because it is nostalgic, but because it refuses to treat tradition as a museum piece. Yoshizawa’s collection asks what these techniques become when they are not preserved behind glass but allowed to do actual work in a contemporary home. The answer, as it turns out, is that they become furniture, lighting, storage. Objects you actually live with.

The things we choose to put in our homes say something about what we value, what we want near us. Choosing an object made with a centuries-old technique, shaped by hand, infused with craft that requires skill and time and human attention, is a different kind of choice than clicking “add to cart” on something designed, manufactured, and shipped in six weeks. That difference matters, even if we do not always articulate why.

Red Craft does not ask you to choose the past over the present. It asks whether there is a version of the present that makes room for both. Given how much of contemporary design feels disposable, the answer Yoshizawa offers feels like a small but genuine relief.

The post 4 Ancient Japanese Crafts Reborn as Furniture You Can Actually Own first appeared on Yanko Design.