Tag Archives: Furniture

Elanco Made Dog-Shaped Furniture Because Your Sofa Has a Flea Problem

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Pet ownership and interior design have always had an uneasy relationship. You pick out a sofa carefully, and within months, it’s covered in fur, scratch marks, or the lingering evidence of a bad flea season. Design spaces rarely acknowledge the animal that shares the room, and pet health brands rarely think to communicate through furniture. Most of the time, these two worlds simply don’t talk to each other.

Elanco, a global animal health company, had other ideas. For the 2026 Fuorisalone, it partnered with Milan-based architecture and design studio Parasite 2.0 to bring the Pet Collection to BASE Milano. The result is a limited-edition series of four pet-inspired furniture pieces that are equal parts campaign, design statement, and visual joke, all presented at one of Milan’s most forward-thinking creative venues.

Designers: Elanco, Parasite 2.0

The whole thing starts from a simple but uncomfortable truth. Fleas don’t just live on pets; they infest homes too, spreading through the furniture and floors that pets and people share. Elanco’s point is that your sofa and your dog aren’t as different as you think, at least not from a flea’s perspective. The collection makes that idea impossible to ignore.

Each piece is a pun on both a breed and a furniture type. The Basset Longue is a chaise longue upholstered in wavy, brown-striped faux fur, shaped after a Basset Hound, and mounted on chrome legs with a tail detail at one end. The Dalmatian is a wide sofa in black-spotted white plush with dark, rounded backrests that look like a dog curled up in place.

The Yorkchair is a chunky armchair draped entirely in long, golden faux fur with a small chrome detail on the back, very much like a Yorkshire Terrier wearing a collar. Then there’s the Gattond, which departs from the canine theme and becomes a feline-inspired coffee table, its polished metal top sitting on a rounded, fuzzy golden base with a tail sticking out from the side.

The Pet Collection is on view at BASE Milano as part of the 2026 Fuorisalone, and it’s the kind of exhibit that sticks with you long after you’ve left the room. Not because the furniture is particularly comfortable, mind you, but because the message is hard to unsee once you’ve seen it. Your sofa and your dog are, apparently, not so different after all.

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This Chair at Milan Design Week Looks Like a Forest Grew a Seat

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The armchair has been one of the most contested territories in furniture design for over a century, from Alvar Aalto’s bent plywood experiments to Arne Jacobsen’s Swan Chair. Designers keep returning to the seated form as a test of where material technology and formal imagination currently meet. Beltrame Breuil, an architectural practice based in Tarvisio and Vienna, took their turn at Salone Satellite 2026 with a chair that brings alpine botany directly into that conversation. Their furniture brand Picule presented CLVR, a seat assembled from four bent-wood leaf forms rising from a circular steel base, and it is the kind of debut that reminds you why Salone Satellite exists.

Two of CLVR’s four leaves are upholstered in a mossy, boucle-like forest green textile, covering the tall backrest and the lower front surface where the body settles. The other two are left as bare stained wood, their grain visible under the deep green finish, extending outward from the center like wings. All four share one curvature and one design logic, shaped by bent wood, which is what holds the composition together despite its apparent asymmetry. The design is coherent because its grammar is consistent, even as the function of each leaf changes.

Designer: Beltrame Breuil

The circular steel plate at the base functions as a pedestal, grounding the organic spread of the leaves and lending the piece a measured architectural gravity. At 112 cm tall and 125 cm wide, CLVR reads as a statement lounge object first and a chair second. It has the presence of a small throne, designed to anchor a room rather than disappear into it. The scale is deliberate, positioning the chair as a piece of functional sculpture that occupies its space with confidence.

Picule is Beltrame Breuil’s way of funneling architectural discipline into objects scaled for domestic life. The studio’s Tarvisio base sits in Italy’s northeastern corner, where the Julian Alps press against the Austrian and Slovenian borders. That geography gives CLVR its conceptual grounding; this is a studio that builds in that landscape, not one pulling a leaf motif from a mood board. The alpine forest inspiration feels earned, and it gives the chair a story that goes beyond its form.

The bent-wood forming technique reinforces that connection, requiring an intimacy with the material that keeps the work tethered to craft. The chair’s forest green palette, running across bare wood and woven textile in two calibrated tones, holds the composition together as one chromatic idea rather than a collage of parts. It’s a thoughtful detail that shows how completely the studio considered the object from every angle, ensuring the material and color choices support the core concept.

Beltrame Breuil is presenting the full Picule collection, including the CLVR chair, at Salone Satellite 2026. You can find it in Hall 5 at Stand E10 at Fiera Milano, Rho, through April 26. The photos do a fair job of capturing the silhouette, but the bent-wood grain and the textile’s tactile quality are things that land most clearly when you are standing right in front of it. Go see it before the fair closes.

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The Side Table That Holds One Book Right in Its Legs

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Most furniture design is an exercise in addition. More drawers. More shelves. More compartments to fill with things we forget we own. It is refreshing, then, to come across a piece that does the exact opposite and still lands somewhere quietly brilliant.

Meet the Notch Side Table, designed by Liam de la Bedoyere of Bored Eye Design. It is a flat-pack side table made of wood, clean-lined and minimal in the way that good, thoughtful furniture tends to be. From certain angles, it looks almost unremarkable. Two sets of paired legs, a flat top, honest grain. Then you look between the legs and notice the cutout, a precisely carved notch sized to hold a single book suspended between the panels, spine facing out, held steady by the tension of the slot. That is it. That is the entire idea. And somehow, it is one of the more satisfying design moves I have seen in a while.

Designer Name: Liam de la Bedoyere (Bored Eye Design)

The designer’s own framing says it best: material is removed to add use. Rather than building up, de la Bedoyere carved away. By taking wood out, he created a dedicated slot that functions as a book holder without adding any extra hardware, brackets, or fussy mechanisms. The notch is load-bearing in the most elegant sense of the word. It is structural and functional all at once, and it costs the table almost nothing to include. That kind of efficiency is harder to achieve than it looks.

Bored Eye Design is a one-person independent studio, and the Notch feels like the kind of piece that could only come from someone working without a committee. There is a specificity to it, an opinion embedded in the design, that bigger furniture brands tend to sand down in favour of mass appeal. De la Bedoyere has been quietly putting out thoughtful concepts through his Instagram, and the Notch is the one that feels most resolved. It has a clear point of view.

That point of view, as far as I can read it, is about intentionality. The notch holds exactly one book. Not a stack, not an assortment of odds and ends, just one. That constraint is a feature, not a limitation. It asks you to choose. It reminds you, every time you walk past it, that you had a book you were reading, that you actually meant to pick it back up. The book is not tucked away out of sight. It is displayed between the legs of the table like a small personal exhibit.

That is a subtle but genuinely interesting cultural statement about how we relate to the things we claim to care about. Books are increasingly used as decor, stacked artfully on coffee tables in colours that match throw pillows. The Notch does not stack them. It slots one in at midpoint, visible and accessible, in a way that feels more honest than a colour-coordinated pile ever could.

Practically speaking, the flat-pack construction means the table ships flat and assembles without tools that would make your Sunday miserable. The joinery is clean, and the interlocking parts are visible in the design in a way that feels deliberate rather than accidentally exposed. Looking at the disassembled photos, there is a puzzle-like quality to the whole thing that makes it more interesting, not less.

The material is ash wood with a warm, pale grain, and the photos styled with what appears to be a Dieter Rams monograph slotted in the notch feel entirely on brand. That orange spine against the pale timber is doing real editorial work, and it is hard not to appreciate the faintly meta quality of a design book being cradled by a well-designed table.

Whether the Notch moves into full production beyond its current personal project status, I genuinely hope it does. Furniture that nudges you toward more thoughtful habits without being preachy about it is rare. The Notch does not lecture you about slowing down. It just makes it a little easier to do exactly that, by doing less with considerably more conviction.

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The 3D-Printed Chair That Moves With You, Not Against You

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The first time I looked at the Flow Chair, I thought it was a sculpture. The sinuous, looping form bending into itself like a standing wave frozen mid-motion. No visible joints, no screws, no padding, no legs in the traditional sense. Just one continuous ribbon of material that somehow, impossibly, holds a person’s weight while gently rocking beneath them.

That last part surprised me. The Flow Chair, designed by Daniel Streilein and Henry Boy of the German studio Boldobjects, is not actually a chair in the way we typically think about chairs. It’s a rocking stool, and it functions through the intelligence of its shape rather than through any kind of mechanism. You shift your weight, and it responds. You lean forward to concentrate, and it follows. You settle back, and it adjusts. No moving parts. No knobs to turn. No assembly required. The geometry does all the work.

Designers: Daniel Streilein and Henry Boy (Boldobjects)

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, specifically the idea that so much of modern ergonomic furniture design has overcomplicated the act of sitting. We’ve added lumbar supports and pneumatic height adjustors and tilt-tension knobs, and yet most office workers still end the day with a stiff back and a neck that sounds like a bowl of cereal. The Flow Chair is a direct argument against all of that. Its proposition is simple: give the body room to move, and it will figure out the rest.

The manufacturing process is just as interesting as the design itself. The Flow Chair is produced using large-scale pellet 3D printing, a more industrial cousin of the desktop 3D printing most people are familiar with. This process allows for the kind of fluid, organic geometry that would be nearly impossible, and almost certainly cost-prohibitive, to achieve through traditional molding or casting. You can actually see the layer lines running across the surface of the chair, horizontal bands that trace the path of the print head as it built the form up from nothing. Most designers would treat those lines as a flaw. Streilein and Boy treat them as texture, a visual record of how the object came to be. I find that genuinely compelling. The chair doesn’t hide what it is.

What makes the sustainability story here worth paying attention to is that it isn’t just a marketing footnote. The Flow Chair is made from a single material: recycled PETG. No adhesives, no hardware, no secondary components of any kind. When the stool eventually reaches the end of its life, it can go back into the production cycle without complex processing. The branding is embossed directly into the base material rather than applied as a separate label. Even the decision to manufacture locally in Germany shortens the supply chain in a meaningful way. Every design choice reinforces the same intention, and that kind of coherence is rarer than it should be.

It also comes in a range of colors including deep forest green, powder blue, sage, and near-black, which tells you something about how Boldobjects is thinking about this object. It’s not purely a functional tool. It’s a considered, designerly thing meant to live in real spaces with real aesthetics. Looking at the photographs, it holds its own in a warm, book-lined study just as well as it does in an eclectic living room. That versatility is harder to engineer than it looks.

The Flow Chair sits, if you’ll allow the pun, at an interesting intersection. It belongs in a conversation about sustainable materials and digital fabrication, yes, but it also belongs in a conversation about what good design actually feels like to live with. Not just to look at. Not just to Instagram. To actually use, day after day, in the small and ordinary act of sitting down. That turns out to be a higher bar than most furniture ever clears.

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This Coffee Table Turns Into Abstract Sculpture by Loosening 2 Knobs

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Furniture has always had a love-hate relationship with art. Some pieces are so carefully considered in form that they become objects of admiration, almost too precious to actually use. Others are purely utilitarian and couldn’t care less about looking good. Few pieces try to genuinely blur that line, but that’s the territory experimental artist and designer Michael Jantzen has been working in for decades.

His Interactive Segmented Tables are a compelling example of that approach. These aren’t concepts or prototypes; they’re actual, built furniture that sits in a room and waits for you to decide what they should be. At any given moment, they can work as a proper low table for a drink or a book, and with a few turns of their knobs, transform into something that belongs in a gallery.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

The mechanism behind this is disarmingly simple. Each table is made up of identical segments threaded along a center support rod, held in place by two disc-shaped knobs on either end. Loosen those knobs, and you can rotate each segment independently into any configuration you like. Each segment has at least one flat side, so aligning enough of them with flat faces pointing upward turns the whole thing into a stable surface.

This is where the tables stop being passive objects and start being tools of expression. You might rotate the segments into something visually striking when guests arrive, then pull them flat when you need an actual surface for a lamp or a tray. The piece adapts to the occasion rather than the other way around, which is rarely something a table can honestly claim to do.

What makes this even more interesting is that the segments are two-toned, so rotating them doesn’t just change the table’s shape; it also shifts its color pattern. A configuration that shows one dominant tone can open up into a mix of both with a single rearrangement. You could work with the same piece for years and never feel like you’ve fully exhausted what it can look like.

The Interactive Segmented Tables also aren’t locked into a single form factor. Jantzen designed them to be available in many different sizes and table shapes, and they can be made from a range of materials. This means the same essential concept can translate into very different objects, depending on what a space or an owner calls for, without losing what makes them worth owning in the first place.

For anyone tired of furniture that commits too hard to a single personality, these tables offer something different. There’s a quiet pleasure in knowing you can reach down, loosen two knobs, and change what’s sitting in your living room without buying anything new. Few objects manage to be this honest about the fact that taste and function aren’t always fixed, and that’s a more useful quality than it sounds.

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The Ghost of Carlo Mollino’s Best Table Has Finally Arrived

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Some designs don’t age. They just wait. The Vertebra table by Carlo Mollino has spent the last 75 years doing exactly that, existing in the margins of design history as a tantalizing “what if.” Created in 1950, the piece was only ever realized in two physical examples, both of which eventually found their way to auction houses where collectors paid serious money to own a slice of Mollino’s particular brand of genius. The rest of us could only stare at photographs.

That changes this week. Italian design house Zanotta has acquired the Carlo Mollino archive from the Italian State through a public tender, securing exclusive rights to produce 30 of his designs. The first piece to come out of that deal is the Vertebra table, which is making its industrial production debut at Milan Design Week 2026. For anyone who follows design even loosely, this is a genuinely exciting moment.

Designer: Zanotta (Carlo Mollino)

If the name Carlo Mollino isn’t immediately familiar, here’s the short version: he was a Turin-born architect, designer, photographer, racing driver, skier, and aviation enthusiast who lived from 1905 to 1973 and made everyone around him look like they weren’t trying hard enough. He synthesized Expressionism, Futurism, Organicism, and Surrealism into a design language that felt simultaneously ancient and far ahead of its time. His furniture didn’t follow trends. It followed the human body.

That’s precisely what makes the Vertebra table so arresting. The name isn’t decorative. Mollino perceived furniture not as mere decoration, but as an extension of the body in motion, and the Vertebra’s sinuous, almost skeletal structure makes that philosophy literal. Its base is formed from a single continuous sheet of plywood that curves and flexes in ways that feel less like woodworking and more like anatomy. Look at it long enough and you start to see ribs, joints, a spine caught in mid-motion. It’s the kind of design that makes you forget you’re looking at a table.

The production history adds a certain poetry to the moment. Mollino spent much of his career working with a carpentry workshop in Turin to create pieces in limited runs, often for specific clients. The Vertebra was originally designed for the Lattes publishing house in Turin. That it never made it to industrial production during his lifetime is one of those quiet design world tragedies that don’t get talked about enough. His furniture was always collector territory, commanding extraordinary prices at auction and sitting in the collections of major design museums. Beautiful, but locked away.

What Zanotta is doing here feels like more than just a business move. By going through the Italian State, winning a public tender, and committing to serial production, they’re essentially arguing that Mollino’s work belongs to a wider audience. That’s a stance worth appreciating. Good design shouldn’t only exist in the hands of people who can afford auction house prices, and bringing a piece like the Vertebra into serial production opens up a real conversation about access, legacy, and what it means to steward a designer’s archive responsibly.

The unveiling at Milan Design Week is set within an immersive installation inside the Zanotta flagship store, where curtains fluidly define space and the organic forms of the human body serve as a visual reference. It sounds like exactly the kind of environment that would make Mollino feel at home. He was always staging things, always thinking about how space, form, and the presence of the body existed in relation to each other.

The broader archive Zanotta now holds includes tens of thousands of drawings, sketches, photographs, handwritten notes, and typed documents alongside those 30 production-ready projects. That’s a significant responsibility, and how they steward it over the coming years will say a lot about their real commitment to doing Mollino’s legacy justice. For now, though, the Vertebra is the headline. A table that waited 75 years to be made at scale, by a designer who saw furniture as something alive. It’s the kind of debut that reminds you why design history is worth paying attention to.

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Raw-Edges Just Designed a Chair That Needs Zero Fasteners

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Upholstery has been done the same way for centuries. Foam gets glued, tacked, or stapled onto a frame, and that’s more or less the end of the story. It’s functional, it’s reliable, and it’s almost never questioned. London-based Raw-Edges Design Studio decided it was worth questioning.

Yael Mer and Shay Alkalay, the duo behind Raw-Edges, have built their entire creative identity around exactly this kind of thinking. Founded in 2007 after the two met at the Royal College of Art, the studio has spent nearly two decades treating everyday objects as unsolved puzzles worth reopening. Their latest experimental chair design is a perfect example of how they operate: take a convention that everyone has accepted without debate, strip it down to first principles, and see if a smarter answer has been sitting there all along. The answer, in this case, is a notch.

Designer: Raw-Edges Design Studio

The chair, still unnamed and currently in the design phase, uses no adhesives, no tacks, no staples, none of the usual fasteners that hold most upholstered furniture together. The wooden frame is carved with a deliberate groove, and the upholstered foam cushion is simply wedged into it. Friction does the rest. The whole thing holds together through the logic of fit rather than the intervention of hardware. It sounds almost too simple, and that’s kind of the point.

I keep thinking about why this feels so satisfying to look at, and I think it comes down to the fact that we’ve been conditioned to accept over-engineering as a sign of quality. More parts, more steps, more materials, more adhesives: these feel like indicators of a serious product. Raw-Edges pushes back on that quietly. The notch solution is elegant precisely because it asks less of the chair, not more. It treats the materials as intelligent components that can work together without being forced.

This thinking is very on-brand for Raw-Edges. Their work sits comfortably in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Vitra Design Museum, and The Art Institute of Chicago, and the studio has collaborated with names like Louis Vuitton, Vitra, Stella McCartney, and Moroso. They’ve won the A&W Designers of the Year award, a Wallpaper Design Award, and were named Designers of the Future at Design Miami/Basel. None of that happened by accident. It’s the result of a studio that consistently asks questions other designers tend to skip over.

Their philosophy, as they describe it, begins with humble experimentation and a search for unconventional principles. That’s a gracious way of saying they don’t assume the current answer is the best one. The project is being developed in collaboration with Italian furniture company Bolzan, which strongly suggests this isn’t destined to stay a prototype forever. A saleable product feels like the logical next step, and that’s worth getting excited about.

The implications here also stretch beyond aesthetics. A chair held together by friction rather than glue or staples is, by nature, easier to take apart. The foam can be removed, replaced, or recycled separately from the frame. In a design culture increasingly preoccupied with repairability, longevity, and what happens to products at the end of their lives, this approach carries real practical weight. And it doesn’t feel like a sustainability talking point bolted onto a product after the fact. It feels like an idea that was right from the start.

Furniture design doesn’t often make headlines outside trade publications and design weeks, but this concept deserves a wider audience. Not because it’s flashy, and not because it’s about to show up in every furniture showroom next season, but because it demonstrates that design thinking is still genuinely capable of surprise. Sometimes the most powerful idea is a groove in a piece of wood and the confidence to trust it.

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Issey Miyake’s Most Beautiful Material Was Always the Scrap

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

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

Designer: Satoshi Kondo of MIYAKE DESIGN STUDIO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Dórica Just Proved Good Design Belongs on Your Kitchen Counter

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

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

Designer: Sebastián Ángeles for Dórica

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Designer: Davide Bozzo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post The ZERO Chair Has No Welds, No Joints, No Apologies first appeared on Yanko Design.