Tag Archives: Furniture

Ripple Shelf’s Wavy Wooden Sides Are Actually a Tool-Free Height System

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Most adjustable shelving systems make a quiet trade-off. To offer flexibility, they rely on rail channels, pin holes, or brackets that work well enough but bring a decidedly utilitarian look to any room. The result is a shelf that adapts to your needs but rarely looks like it was designed with much intention beyond storage. Hiding the hardware means losing flexibility; keeping it means living with it.

The Ripple Shelf from Sarajevo-based Dilema Studio takes a different approach, one where the shelf’s most visually distinctive element is also its adjustment mechanism. The vertical supports on each side run the full height of the frame in an undulating rippled profile. Those waves aren’t decorative flourishes; they’re guides. The middle shelves slot into them and can be repositioned to different heights without any tools or additional hardware.

Designer: Ermin Alić (Studio Dilema)

The logic here is pretty satisfying. Instead of adding a separate tracking or pinning system, Dilema embedded the mechanism directly into the form. The rippled surface of each support creates natural stopping points along the length of the frame, so positioning a shelf is as intuitive as sliding it into place. There’s nothing to install, nothing to adjust, and nothing to lose at the back of a drawer.

That practicality matters more than it might seem. Someone styling a home office one season and reorganizing it as their book collection doubles doesn’t need to buy a new shelf; they just move the existing ones. A family using the same unit to hold kids’ toys and, later, a collection of records and plants has one piece that grows with the space. The shelf changes; the shelf unit doesn’t.

The frame’s fixed top and bottom shelves keep everything stable while the interior remains open to change. Made from beech wood and measuring 750 × 350 × 800 mm, it comes in several color options, including terracotta, sage green, slate blue, and a natural off-white, each with a solid stain that lets the grain show through. The compact footprint makes it workable in tighter rooms without sacrificing capacity.

The system shows up in multiple size configurations, from compact low units to taller multi-shelf towers, giving it range across different rooms and storage needs. That versatility suits living rooms particularly well, where displaying and organizing things often need to share the same piece of furniture. A shelf for ceramics, a lower one for books, a bottom slot for a basket; the spacing adjusts to whatever the situation asks for.

What keeps the Ripple Shelf from being just another clever-but-impractical furniture concept is that it’s genuinely usable. The ripple mechanism doesn’t require any special technique or learning curve; you move a shelf, and it sits where you put it. It’s the kind of furniture that gets better over time, not because it wears in any particular way, but because it stays genuinely useful as what you put on it changes.

The post Ripple Shelf’s Wavy Wooden Sides Are Actually a Tool-Free Height System 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.

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.

Konstantin Grcic Finally Designed the Office Desk We Needed

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We’ve been designing office desks essentially the same way for decades. Four legs, a flat surface, maybe a drawer if you’re lucky, and an ergonomic chair that costs more than your first car. So when Vitra and German industrial designer Konstantin Grcic quietly dropped the Scout Work Mobile just last month, I paid close attention.

The Scout Work Mobile is part of a larger family of workstation and meeting tables simply called Scout, launched on March 19 of this year. The collection comprises five pieces ranging from stationary desks to mobile variants, and it’s Grcic’s response to how offices actually function today versus how they were designed to function twenty years ago. The Scout Work Mobile is the one that caught my eye: a compact, trapezoidal desk on wheels with a tubular steel frame that rises up and encircles the work surface.

Designer: Konstantin Grcic

That frame is the whole story, really. It’s not decorative. It’s not there to look good in a mood board (though it absolutely does). The frame acts as a grab handle when you’re rolling the thing across a room, a mounting point for privacy screens, and a place to hang accessories. Without any attachments, it still creates what Vitra describes as a “room-within-a-room” effect, a bit of visual and psychological separation from whatever chaos is happening around you. For those of us who’ve had to MacGyver focus time in open-plan offices using noise-cancelling headphones and pure denial, that feels like a genuine design insight rather than a marketing afterthought.

Grcic is known for what Vitra calls a “severely simple” aesthetic. He doesn’t add things for the sake of adding them, and the Scout Work Mobile reflects that clearly: the height adjustment and tilting function work entirely without electricity. No motors, no app, no firmware updates required. It adjusts by hand. That might sound unremarkable, but compared to the increasingly tech-dependent office furniture being released right now, it reads almost like a radical statement.

The mobile aspect of Scout is where the design really earns its name. Return-to-office mandates are reshaping how companies think about their physical spaces, and the rigid assigned-desk model is quietly becoming a liability. Hot-desking, collaborative hubs, project clusters, training rooms that double as focus spaces. Modern offices are being asked to do a lot more with the same square footage. Scout was built for exactly that kind of environment. You grab it, roll it where you need it, work, and move on. No teardown required. No reconfiguration meeting on the calendar.

Grcic put it plainly in an interview with Vitra Magazine: “The aim is not to replace what already exists. Rather, the system is an extension or complementary offering that responds to different levels and styles of work.” That kind of restraint is rare in product design, where the temptation is always to pitch your thing as the only thing. Scout doesn’t ask to own your whole office. It just wants to be useful wherever you put it.

Aesthetically, it sits in that satisfying middle ground between industrial and refined. The tubular steel frame reads as utilitarian at first glance, but the trapezoidal silhouette and deliberate proportions make it feel considered rather than clinical. It’s the kind of furniture that would look at home in a forward-thinking tech company, a design school studio, or a well-curated co-working space. It isn’t trying to disappear into the background, and it certainly doesn’t need to.

What makes Scout genuinely interesting is that it treats mobility as a first principle rather than a feature tacked on after the fact. Desks on wheels have existed forever, but most of them feel like an afterthought, as if someone just bolted casters onto a standard table and called it agile. Grcic designed the Scout Work Mobile from the ground up with movement in mind, and the difference is visible in every element. Office furniture rarely makes me stop and think twice. The Scout Work Mobile managed to.

The post Konstantin Grcic Finally Designed the Office Desk We Needed first appeared on Yanko Design.

These Old Bike Frames Upcycled Into Armchairs Are The Coolest Thing You’ll See Today

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Most upcycling projects ask you to forget what something used to be. Omri Piko Kahan’s bike frame chairs ask the opposite. The geometry is still unmistakably a bicycle frame, the head tube, the top tube, the triangulated rear triangle, all of it present and accounted for, just oriented sideways and asked to hold a person instead of propel one. Kahan, an industrial designer based in Israel, builds lounge chairs from pairs of retired frames, and the whole point is that the donor material remains fully readable, repurposed without being disguised.

Structurally, the approach is clean and considered. Each frame pair is positioned symmetrically, fork and chainstay ends touching the floor as legs, the top tube running horizontally as an armrest. A slung seat and backrest in leather or canvas complete the form. The result has the relaxed posture of a Barcelona chair and the material honesty of something that was clearly built, not styled.

Designer: Omri Piko Kahan

Bicycle frames are absurdly overbuilt for what Kahan is asking them to do. A modern aluminum road frame is engineered to survive repeated impact loads from a rider pushing 300 watts through rough tarmac, and it does that while weighing somewhere between 1,000 and 1,400 grams. The structural surplus in that kind of engineering is enormous, which is why two of them positioned as a chair frame and asked to support a seated adult is, from a load-bearing standpoint, almost comically within spec. The geometry does the rest. Bicycle frames already resolve forces through triangulated sections, and a lounge chair asks for exactly that kind of lateral and compressive stability.

What Kahan has figured out is the orientation problem. Flip a frame on its side and the existing tube angles don’t automatically produce a useful chair geometry. The fork legs and chainstay ends need to hit the floor at the right height relative to each other, the top tube needs to land at armrest height, and the whole thing needs to produce a seat rake that doesn’t pitch you forward or swallow you whole. The matched top tube angles across both frames in the Cube and Trek build suggest this took real iteration, because they align with a precision that reads as deliberate rather than lucky. Filed fillets at the junctions and a custom setback upper support holding the sling confirm someone was paying close attention to finish quality.

The two builds photographed so far, one pairing a blue Cube road frame with a Trek, another combining a GT Transeo 3.0 with what appears to be a Supreme-branded MTB frame, show how much the donor bikes drive the final character of each piece. The GT build in particular has a longer wheelbase geometry that gives the chair a wider, more reclined stance than the Cube version. Kahan is taking custom orders, with pricing worked out per commission, which makes sense given that no two donor frame combinations will produce the same structural or ergonomic outcome.

The post These Old Bike Frames Upcycled Into Armchairs Are The Coolest Thing You’ll See Today first appeared on Yanko Design.

A Transforming Table-Chair That Turns Tradition into Space-Saving Intelligence

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At a time when living spaces are shrinking while expectations from them continue to expand, this design presents a thoughtful response that is both rooted in tradition and aligned with contemporary needs.

Emerging from the context of rising housing pressures in Taiwan, where compact homes are increasingly becoming the norm, the project addresses a fundamental question: how can furniture adapt to limited space without compromising comfort or experience? Rather than treating furniture as static, single-purpose objects, the designer reimagines them as dynamic systems capable of transformation.

Designer: Che-Chia Hsu

At the heart of this piece lies a deep engagement with traditional Chinese woodworking techniques, particularly the precision of tenon joints. These joints move beyond being structural solutions and become expressions of calculated craftsmanship, where geometry, material behavior, and human interaction converge. The result is a construction that feels both minimal and robust, relying on accuracy instead of excess.

The furniture set is designed to integrate storage and seating within a compact footprint. A chair is concealed within the table and can be pulled out, unfolded, and expanded into a functional seat. The process is intuitive: the chair is extracted, the seat and backrest are opened, and the backrest angle is adjusted using velcro. The transformation is smooth and unobtrusive, allowing the object to shift roles effortlessly.

What distinguishes this design is its reliance on the user’s own body as part of the structural system. Instead of depending entirely on rigid supports, the chair uses the tension generated by the sitter to stabilize the backrest. This introduces a subtle interaction between user and object, where the act of sitting becomes integral to how the design performs. The experience feels efficient, responsive, and quietly intelligent.

Material choices reinforce this balance between function and experience. Lightweight pine wood panels provide durability while ensuring ease of movement. Paired with gray cotton linen fabric, the design introduces a tactile softness that enhances comfort. The fabric is breathable and visually understated, complementing the natural warmth of the wood. Together, these materials create a calm, cohesive aesthetic suited to contemporary interiors.

The development of the project reflects a layered and rigorous process. The designer began by studying traditional joinery techniques through literature, followed by hands-on training under a woodcraft master. This immersion enabled a deeper understanding of the craft beyond theory. Building on this foundation, the designer explored ways to translate these techniques into a modern, functional context through research and experimentation.

What emerges is a design that treats constraint as a starting point rather than a limitation. The piece brings together traditional knowledge and contemporary living patterns, shaping an object that adapts, responds, and participates in everyday use. It reflects a way of designing where space, material, and human interaction are considered together, resulting in furniture that feels considered, purposeful, and in tune with the realities of modern living.

The post A Transforming Table-Chair That Turns Tradition into Space-Saving Intelligence first appeared on Yanko Design.

A Transforming Table-Chair That Turns Tradition into Space-Saving Intelligence

Posted on by

At a time when living spaces are shrinking while expectations from them continue to expand, this design presents a thoughtful response that is both rooted in tradition and aligned with contemporary needs.

Emerging from the context of rising housing pressures in Taiwan, where compact homes are increasingly becoming the norm, the project addresses a fundamental question: how can furniture adapt to limited space without compromising comfort or experience? Rather than treating furniture as static, single-purpose objects, the designer reimagines them as dynamic systems capable of transformation.

Designer: Che-Chia Hsu

At the heart of this piece lies a deep engagement with traditional Chinese woodworking techniques, particularly the precision of tenon joints. These joints move beyond being structural solutions and become expressions of calculated craftsmanship, where geometry, material behavior, and human interaction converge. The result is a construction that feels both minimal and robust, relying on accuracy instead of excess.

The furniture set is designed to integrate storage and seating within a compact footprint. A chair is concealed within the table and can be pulled out, unfolded, and expanded into a functional seat. The process is intuitive: the chair is extracted, the seat and backrest are opened, and the backrest angle is adjusted using velcro. The transformation is smooth and unobtrusive, allowing the object to shift roles effortlessly.

What distinguishes this design is its reliance on the user’s own body as part of the structural system. Instead of depending entirely on rigid supports, the chair uses the tension generated by the sitter to stabilize the backrest. This introduces a subtle interaction between user and object, where the act of sitting becomes integral to how the design performs. The experience feels efficient, responsive, and quietly intelligent.

Material choices reinforce this balance between function and experience. Lightweight pine wood panels provide durability while ensuring ease of movement. Paired with gray cotton linen fabric, the design introduces a tactile softness that enhances comfort. The fabric is breathable and visually understated, complementing the natural warmth of the wood. Together, these materials create a calm, cohesive aesthetic suited to contemporary interiors.

The development of the project reflects a layered and rigorous process. The designer began by studying traditional joinery techniques through literature, followed by hands-on training under a woodcraft master. This immersion enabled a deeper understanding of the craft beyond theory. Building on this foundation, the designer explored ways to translate these techniques into a modern, functional context through research and experimentation.

What emerges is a design that treats constraint as a starting point rather than a limitation. The piece brings together traditional knowledge and contemporary living patterns, shaping an object that adapts, responds, and participates in everyday use. It reflects a way of designing where space, material, and human interaction are considered together, resulting in furniture that feels considered, purposeful, and in tune with the realities of modern living.

The post A Transforming Table-Chair That Turns Tradition into Space-Saving Intelligence first appeared on Yanko Design.

These Steel Chairs Are Too Big to Sit In: Walk Through Them Instead

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Most public art earns its place on a pedestal and stays there. It asks you to look, maybe photograph it, and walk away. The relationship between viewer and work rarely extends beyond that brief transaction. That’s been the convention for a long time, but there’s a growing push for installations that don’t just occupy public space but actually do something within it.

Michael Jantzen has been exploring that tension for years. His Moving Furniture series applies a simple idea to ordinary chairs and tables: take each object’s form and repeat it in progressive intervals as if capturing it mid-movement, then connect those moments into a single piece. The result is something you can still sit in or set a drink on, even if it no longer looks quite built for that.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

Monumental Moving Furniture takes that same concept into architectural territory. Built from painted steel, the series consists of abstracted chair and table forms, each generated by moving the original object through space and time and locking its path into a chain of connected segments. At this scale, what started as a reference to everyday objects feels closer to a building than a piece of furniture.

The method behind each piece is consistent. A chair or table is set in motion through space and time, with each interval frozen and joined to the next. Some pieces move only part of the original form; others shift the whole thing. The result is a structure that stops belonging to any single discipline and starts reading as furniture, sculpture, and architecture at once.

Despite being too large to sit in, these sculptures aren’t purely decorative. Each is large enough to walk under and through, giving it a practical function as a pavilion and shelter. That’s not something most public art can claim. Instead of asking people to observe from a polite distance, these structures pull you in, turning a passive encounter into something more physical and immediate.

The series covers both chair forms and table forms, each treated with the same sequential abstraction. Individual pieces have also been grouped into configurations that suggest more complex structures, as if each were a building block for something larger. Painted in vivid, solid colors like white, orange, and yellow, each structure commands attention from a distance and rewards a closer look once you’re standing beneath it.

Public spaces deserve more than objects to look at. They deserve things to experience. Monumental Moving Furniture earns its place on both counts, offering structures large enough to shelter visitors while giving them something genuinely puzzling to engage with. These forms don’t demand reverence. They invite curiosity, exploration, and the kind of slow, circling attention that good public space has always been designed to encourage.

The post These Steel Chairs Are Too Big to Sit In: Walk Through Them Instead first appeared on Yanko Design.

These Steel Chairs Are Too Big to Sit In: Walk Through Them Instead

Posted on by

Most public art earns its place on a pedestal and stays there. It asks you to look, maybe photograph it, and walk away. The relationship between viewer and work rarely extends beyond that brief transaction. That’s been the convention for a long time, but there’s a growing push for installations that don’t just occupy public space but actually do something within it.

Michael Jantzen has been exploring that tension for years. His Moving Furniture series applies a simple idea to ordinary chairs and tables: take each object’s form and repeat it in progressive intervals as if capturing it mid-movement, then connect those moments into a single piece. The result is something you can still sit in or set a drink on, even if it no longer looks quite built for that.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

Monumental Moving Furniture takes that same concept into architectural territory. Built from painted steel, the series consists of abstracted chair and table forms, each generated by moving the original object through space and time and locking its path into a chain of connected segments. At this scale, what started as a reference to everyday objects feels closer to a building than a piece of furniture.

The method behind each piece is consistent. A chair or table is set in motion through space and time, with each interval frozen and joined to the next. Some pieces move only part of the original form; others shift the whole thing. The result is a structure that stops belonging to any single discipline and starts reading as furniture, sculpture, and architecture at once.

Despite being too large to sit in, these sculptures aren’t purely decorative. Each is large enough to walk under and through, giving it a practical function as a pavilion and shelter. That’s not something most public art can claim. Instead of asking people to observe from a polite distance, these structures pull you in, turning a passive encounter into something more physical and immediate.

The series covers both chair forms and table forms, each treated with the same sequential abstraction. Individual pieces have also been grouped into configurations that suggest more complex structures, as if each were a building block for something larger. Painted in vivid, solid colors like white, orange, and yellow, each structure commands attention from a distance and rewards a closer look once you’re standing beneath it.

Public spaces deserve more than objects to look at. They deserve things to experience. Monumental Moving Furniture earns its place on both counts, offering structures large enough to shelter visitors while giving them something genuinely puzzling to engage with. These forms don’t demand reverence. They invite curiosity, exploration, and the kind of slow, circling attention that good public space has always been designed to encourage.

The post These Steel Chairs Are Too Big to Sit In: Walk Through Them Instead first appeared on Yanko Design.

A Stool With Six Legs Just Made Four Feel Outdated

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The humble stool has barely changed in centuries. Four legs, a flat seat, done. It exists in every cafe, classroom, kitchen island, and co-working space on the planet, reliably doing its one job and nothing else. So when a designer comes along and asks what happens if you add just one more leg, the answer should probably be “nothing interesting.” And yet here we are, talking about SQOOL.

SQOOL is a 2025 personal project by Liam de la Bedoyere of Bored Eye Design, a UK-based independent studio that describes itself as creating work that’s anything but boring. At first glance, the stool reads almost like a creature. Six curved legs splayed outward with little rounded feet, a compact circular seat on top, and that one rogue arm reaching upward and curling into a hook. It looks like a cheerful yellow squid that decided to get into the furniture business, and I mean that entirely as a compliment. The photographs make it look alive. Depending on the angle, it shifts between dog, bug, and some friendly unnamed species you’d encounter in an animated film.

Designer: Liam de la Bedoyere (Bored Eye Design)

The concept is deceptively simple. Five legs provide complete stability, the same geometric logic you’d get from a traditional four-legged stool, just with an added sense of security and visual rhythm. The sixth leg is the interesting one. Freed from any load-bearing duty, it becomes something else entirely: a handle for carrying the stool, a hook for a bag or jacket, a rest for your coffee cup, a cradle for a book. The images show it doing all of these things casually, as if the stool has always known it could.

What makes SQOOL feel genuinely considered rather than just whimsical is how that extra function was thought through. The sixth arm doesn’t just stick out awkwardly. It curves deliberately, creating a shape that invites the hand to reach for it. People apparently do this instinctively, discovering its utility through touch rather than any printed instruction. That kind of design, where the object teaches you how to use it without saying a word, is harder to pull off than it looks.

The stacking detail is also worth noting. Getting six legs to nest cleanly on top of each other is a real engineering puzzle, and de la Bedoyere solved it by shaping each leg with enough taper and spacing to allow the stools to slide into each other gracefully. Seen stacked in a column, they look spectacular. Like a sculpture you’d walk past in a gallery and immediately photograph. Which means SQOOL is doing double duty even when no one is sitting on it.

The color choices lean fully into the stool’s playful register. The saturated yellow is hard to miss, and a soft lavender variant appears in some renders, equally confident. These aren’t accent tones chosen to recede politely into a neutral interior. They’re chosen to assert presence. SQOOL isn’t trying to disappear into a corner. It wants to be part of the room, part of the conversation, maybe even part of your grid. That’s not a criticism at all. Personality in furniture is genuinely underrated, and design objects that commit fully to their own character tend to age better than the ones trying to be neutral.

Bored Eye Design’s portfolio shows a consistent interest in objects that are curious and approachable, things that reward a second look and feel good to handle. SQOOL fits neatly into that sensibility. It’s playful without being infantile, practical without being dull, and memorable without leaning on novelty for novelty’s sake. The name alone, a blend of “stool” and something else entirely, already tells you what kind of designer de la Bedoyere is.

The question with any concept project is always whether it would survive production. I think SQOOL could. The logic holds up. The form has already been thought through with stackability in mind, which is usually where playful concepts fall apart. A stool this considered, this expressive, and this genuinely useful deserves more than a render portfolio. It deserves a production run.

The post A Stool With Six Legs Just Made Four Feel Outdated first appeared on Yanko Design.