Wellhouse puts most efficient micro-camping layout inside of the Kei Toyota/Daihatsu camper van

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Micro camper vans are having a day in the sun. The delightful concept from Kia is already registered as a must-have in my memory, but the mind is also clouded by what Ovrland Campers did with the Mini 95. The most interesting option, it seems, is still waiting on the sidelines, and I must reconsider. This is Wellhouse Leisure’s take on a small but highly efficient and feature-packed camper van for those who like to travel solo or at max with their partners, willing to adjust with some comfort.

The new micro-camper – slated to debut in the UK first (because of the obvious import convenience) – would be based on the Kei van from Toyota/Daihatsu and will be dubbed Daihatsu Wake & Toyota Pixis Mega Microcamper. Wellhouse explains, “The Daihatsu Wake and Toyota Pixie are the same vehicle and are built by Daihatsu in Japan and the Toyota version is just a rebadged Daihatsu.” Wellhouse continues to inform that it has received the first Daihatsu Wake microvan for conversion, and what we see in the images for now is an adaptation of what the eventual camper van would look like. Let’s understand how well it will be furnished in the article below.

Designer:  Wellhouse Leisure

Solo camping is definitely the idea behind how the Daihatsu Wake’s layout is planned. But the final layout is still in the works. Presumably, Wellhouse would make provisions to sneak in another person. How it is visioned for the moment shows the camper with a unique three-seat solo-sleeper layout. The floor plan shows that the front passenger seat can transform into a single bed while the area behind the driver’s seat remains reserved for utilities, such as the kitchen and some storage.

The Daihatsu Wake received for conversion is powered by a 660cc Turbo 64ps engine. The van can provide a range of up to 45 miles per gallon, and is available in the choice of 2WD or 4WD. If you’re the more adventurous type, you know the drivetrain to go with, and for you, Wellhouse has a lot of convenience provided on the house. The camper floor plan provides for an equipped kitchen with a stove, sink, and an electric pump supplying fresh water to ensure you are well-fed on the road.

The Daihatsu Wake will come with a portable (porta-potty) toilet, and feature some off-grid readiness with a leisure battery and solar panels on the rooftop. Correct specifications are not available, but the images do suggest that a version of the camper van would feature a pop-up roof. We cannot sight a bed in the increased space overhead, but it should definitely increase the headroom inside, that’s a given.

With all the mentioned features onboard, Daihatsu Wake or Toyota Pixie, if you may, will be a highly efficient, micro-camper van with a compelling layout in a vehicle of its size. If you are interested, a Wellhouse Daihatsu camper van model is already available for preorder at £17,995 (roughly $25,000).

 

 

 

 

 

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A House In London Where Floors Drop, Walls Vanish, and the Garden Moves In

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Many homes treat the garden as something separate from daily life, something to look at through a window or visit when the weather is good. This house in Hampstead, redesigned by MATA Architects, takes a far more connected approach. Created for a family with teenage children, the project focuses on transforming the lower ground floor and rethinking how the house relates to its south-facing garden. Rather than adding space for the sake of it, the redesign improves the way the home is lived in and how each room connects to the outdoors.

Before the renovation, the house sat well above the garden, with a long staircase creating a clear sense of separation between inside and outside. The architects solved this by bringing the main living spaces closer to the landscape. The new extension steps almost a meter lower than the original level, placing the family rooms directly alongside the garden. This simple shift changes everything. The ceilings feel taller, natural light reaches deeper into the interior, and the garden becomes part of everyday life instead of feeling like a separate area at the bottom of the plot.

Designer: MATA Architects

The surrounding trees played a major role in shaping the design. Because of root protection zones, the footprint of the extension had to be carefully planned. Instead of forcing a standard solution onto the site, the architects allowed these constraints to guide the final form. That careful response gives the project a sense of balance, as though it belongs naturally within its setting.

The materials help reinforce that feeling. The exterior is wrapped in hit-and-miss iroko hardwood battens, which add texture and warmth while softening the lines of the new addition. Above, a tapering roof stretches outward to provide shade during warmer months. Its underside is finished in mirror-polished stainless steel, reflecting the trees and sky overhead. It is a subtle detail, but an effective one, helping the roof feel lighter and less dominant in the garden.

The standout feature is the fully glazed corner facing the terrace. Large sliding glass panels meet without a visible support, allowing the corner to open completely when the doors are pulled back. When open, the living room flows straight onto the terrace and into the garden beyond. When closed, the glazing still maintains clear views and fills the interior with daylight. It is the kind of feature that looks impressive, but it also genuinely improves how the house works.

Inside, the lowered living room sits at the heart of the extension. The slight change in floor level helps define the area within the open plan layout without the need for walls. Full-height glazing keeps the space bright throughout the day, while views of greenery are visible from almost every angle. Built-in timber shelving adds warmth and prevents the room from feeling too minimal or exposed. It also provides useful storage and gives the living area a stronger sense of identity.

Dinesen ash flooring runs throughout the interior, creating continuity and a calm, natural base for the spaces above it. In the kitchen, a large island in Bianco Eclipse quartzite acts as both a working surface and a gathering point. Positioned centrally, it allows clear views across the living room and out to the garden, helping the kitchen feel connected to the rest of the home.

Next to it, the dining area brings a slightly more intimate atmosphere. A wood-lined alcove, fireplace, and built-in bar make it equally suited to family dinners or hosting friends. Smaller spaces have been given the same level of attention. The powder room features a sculptural stone sink, combining rough texture with clean detailing, softened by warm timber and subtle lighting.

The private rooms continue the same thoughtful approach. The primary suite combines sleeping, working, and bathing in one cohesive space, complete with an integrated study area and an ensuite with a timber soaking tub, concrete sinks, and stainless steel fittings. Another bedroom includes its own fireplace, adding warmth and character.

What makes this home successful is that every design decision feels purposeful. Nothing is there just to impress. By lowering the main rooms and opening them fully to the garden, MATA Architects have turned a once disconnected outdoor space into the natural center of the home.

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Pompom Stool Made From Recycled Aluminum Is Green Design Done Right

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Sustainable design has a branding problem. Not an ethics problem, not a materials problem, but a branding problem. For years, the conversation around circular materials and responsible production has been wrapped in language that feels like a lecture. Worthy, yes. Exciting, rarely. So when a stool shows up at Alcova during Milan Design Week looking like a bouquet of pompoms crowning a cluster of dreamy pastel cylinders, it stops you mid-stride. That stool is the Alice Stool by Studio LoopLoop, and it’s making a very quiet but very pointed argument.

Founded in 2022 by Odin Visser and Charles Gateau, Studio LoopLoop is a Dutch practice that operates somewhere between science lab and design studio. Their approach is hands-on and deliberately self-sufficient, developing their own processes rather than outsourcing to industrial systems they’d rather move away from. For Alice, that methodology produced something that looks almost nothing like what we typically picture when someone says “sustainable furniture.”

Designer: Studio LoopLoop

The base of the stool is made from 100% recycled aluminium, specifically Hydro 100R extrusions, and coloured using a plant-based anodising technique the studio developed in-house. The result is a range of subtle colour gradients that shift from soft sage to deep plum to warm yellow, achieved through controlled dyeing rather than chemical baths heavy with petrochemical inputs. The seat is upholstered with Savian by Bio-Fluff, a plant-based faux fur hand-dyed with NIG natural pigments. The combination is tactile in a way that feels almost irrational for a piece of furniture. You want to touch it. You probably want to sit on it and not get up.

And that’s exactly the point. Studio LoopLoop titled their Alcova presentation “Alice Atomicus,” a nod to both Lewis Carroll’s dreamlike world and the idea of material elements rearranged into something new and entirely unexpected. Sustainability, they’re saying, doesn’t have to arrive in a brown paper wrapper with a guilt trip attached. It can be playful. It can be seductive. It can be soft and sculptural and genuinely desirable.

I think this matters more than it might seem. The design industry has spent years making the case that circular materials can be high-quality, and that case has largely been won. But the emotional argument is trickier. If sustainable design feels like an obligation rather than a pleasure, it will always occupy a niche, admired from a distance but rarely chosen with enthusiasm. The Alice Stool feels like a genuine attempt to close that gap, to make the responsible choice the one you actually want because it’s beautiful, not just because it’s correct.

The use of Savian is worth pausing on. Bio-Fluff’s plant-based fur made its breakthrough in fashion through collaborations with Collina Strada, Martine Rose, and Louis Vuitton, finding a foothold in a luxury market that was already starting to rethink its relationship with animal materials. Moving into furniture feels like a natural extension, and the Alice Stool is one of the clearest demonstrations of Savian’s material potential outside of a clothing rack. Against cool metal cylinders, the fur reads as something almost otherworldly. It’s plush in a way that synthetic faux fur typically isn’t, and the hand-dyed variation in the seat means no two stools look exactly alike.

That detail matters to me personally. Mass production has its place, but there’s a real cultural hunger right now for objects that carry the trace of human hands. The Alice Stool has that quality in abundance. The graduated aluminium tones, the slight unpredictability of natural dye, the tactile generosity of the seat, together they suggest something made with attention rather than efficiency as the primary value.

Studio LoopLoop is a young studio, only four years old, but they’re working with a clarity of vision that feels well ahead of their timeline. The Alice Stool isn’t a concept piece hedged with caveats. It’s a fully formed object that asks a simple question: why should doing the right thing look boring? The answer, apparently, is that it doesn’t have to.

The post Pompom Stool Made From Recycled Aluminum Is Green Design Done Right first appeared on Yanko Design.

La La Land’s Iconic Poster Gets Its Own LEGO Recreation With Minifigure Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone

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Damien Chazelle made La La Land as a love letter to a Los Angeles that barely exists anymore, and to a style of filmmaking that Hollywood had largely abandoned. The big-studio musical, with its choreographed sidewalks and color-saturated dreamscapes, had been gathering dust since the golden age of MGM. Chazelle dusted it off, handed it to two impossibly charming leads, and aimed it squarely at the part of your chest that still believes in chasing something impossible. The result was fourteen Oscar nominations, six wins, and one of the most recognizable movie posters of the decade.

The scene that lives on that poster, Mia and Sebastian dancing above the lights of Los Angeles on a clear, impossible evening, is the film distilled to its purest emotional frame. TesrYer, a LEGO Ideas builder, had the good sense to freeze it in plastic. The resulting diorama layers a deep gradient night sky in dark navy and purple, studded with circular brick elements that somehow read as stars and rolling hills simultaneously, with two minifigures caught mid-step below a glowing streetlamp. The city of stars shimmers behind them in stacked dark tiles, each lit window implied rather than stated.

Designer: TesrYer

The building technique behind that night sky is a bit of LEGO ingenuity. TesrYer has used round plates and dish elements of varying diameters, packed together in overlapping clusters across multiple shades of dark blue, dark purple, and near-black, to create a backdrop that feels organic and volumetric rather than flat. It reads as clouds, as hills, as a stylized abstract sky all at once, which is exactly the kind of visual ambiguity that Chazelle’s cinematographer Linus Sandgren was doing with light and color on the actual film. My favorite detail, though, is the streetlamp. A single white gas-lamp post rising at the right edge of the composition, its globe rendered in translucent white bricks, warm and slightly luminous. It anchors the whole scene the way a key light anchors a stage, and without it the diorama would lose half its atmosphere.

The minifigures are pitch-perfect. Mia arrives in her yellow dress, printed with the small floral detail visible in the film, while Sebastian stands opposite in his white shirt and black tie, one arm raised mid-movement. Whether his hand is positioned correctly is a matter I will leave between TesrYer and Ryan Gosling.

LEGO Ideas is the fan-design platform where community-built MOCs (My Own Creations) gather votes toward the 10,000-supporter threshold required for official LEGO review. TesrYer’s diorama is currently in the early stages of its run, with nearly a 1,000 supporters and 334 days left on the clock. If you want to see this lovely little slice of cinematic nostalgia make it to a box, head to the LEGO Ideas page and cast your vote here.

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Love Hultén Built a Pink Floyd Prism Guitar You Can Actually Play

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The equilateral triangle is one of the most psychologically loaded forms in Western visual culture. It appears on currency, on occult diagrams, on the cover of the best-selling rock album of all time, and now, with precise white planes and amber jewel controls, on the body of a custom synthesizer guitar made by Swedish instrument designer Love Hultén. The Magicos-2, unveiled in late 2025, carries that shape with full awareness of its freight. Hultén has built Darth Vader synths, bonsai MIDI sculptures, NES-inspired keyboards, and a circular Game Boy for clients over the years, and we have covered the lot of them here at YD. Each one takes a form that feels conceptually wrong for an instrument and makes it feel inevitable. This one takes the prism from The Dark Side of the Moon and turns it into something you can actually play.

Commissioned by a private client and described by Hultén himself as a “triangular oddity born from deranged imagination and psychedelic fandom,” the Magicos-2 is a double-necked instrument housing a 1010music Tangerine module on one arm and a Lemondrop on the other. The detachable base unit, a trapezoidal slab that sits below the main body and separates cleanly for transport, contains the effects chain: Walrus Audio Lore for reverse reverb and ethereal drones, Collision Devices TARs for fuzz and distortion. A rose quartz crystal pyramid sits at the center of that base, lit from within. Hultén calls it the crystalline emitter, and at this point, questioning the nomenclature feels beside the point.

Designer: Love Hultén

Alexis Mardas, better known as Magic Alex, was the Beatles’ in-house electronics wizard during the Apple Corps years, a man who promised John Lennon wallpaper that played music, a force field for the house, and an amplifier that would go to a million. Almost none of it worked. What he left behind was the irresistible idea of a device that operates somewhere between real technology and pure mythology, an object whose presence in a room changes the room’s frequency before it ever produces a sound. Hultén name-drops Mardas directly in the Magicos-2’s description, and the invocation lands. This instrument carries that same energy: technically rigorous, visually hallucinatory, and spiritually somewhere between a laboratory prototype and a sacred relic.

The Tangerine and Lemondrop, both 1010music modules, sit one per neck, each a dense and malleable synthesis engine with its own voice and parameter set. Having two discrete sound sources mounted symmetrically on the triangular body means the player can run parallel sonic worlds simultaneously, layering Mellotron-style string leads against drones, or pushing both into the Lore’s reverse reverb to create the kind of sustained wash that makes people stop and stare at the ceiling. The fretboard grids running along each white arm read visually as pure geometry, equal parts instrument neck and architectural elevation drawing. Two necks, two engines, one triangular chassis: the form follows the function with a directness that most instrument designers would kill for.

Walrus Audio’s Lore pedal handles the reverse delay and ethereal glow, celebrated among ambient and drone players for its ability to turn almost any input into a sustained, backward-breathing atmosphere. Collision Devices’ TARs sits alongside it, adding the fuzz and harmonic density that filters the whole signal into what Hultén memorably describes as a carpet of sonic moss. The base connects to the triangular body via a clean physical joint visible as a horizontal seam in the silhouette, detaching entirely for transport or for reconfiguring the signal chain. That modularity reinforces the instrument’s identity as a system rather than a single object, which matters practically when you are carrying something shaped like a pyramid to a gig.

The nine amber teardrop controls embedded in the triangular face, warm brown and orange against the flat white surface, are the one moment of color in the whole instrument, and they carry the weight of that responsibility well. They read like something between a control panel and a constellation. The crystal pyramid in the base glows softly beneath them. The chakras, per Hultén, are aligned. I believe him.

The post Love Hultén Built a Pink Floyd Prism Guitar You Can Actually Play first appeared on Yanko Design.

37-Inch Tires, Body-On-Frame, No Touchscreen: Hyundai’s Boulder Concept Should Make Jeep Nervous

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The midsize truck and off-road SUV segment is the most brand-loyal territory in the American automotive market. Bronco buyers bleed blue oval. Wrangler owners have a hand wave. Fourth-generation 4Runner devotees treat the truck’s stubborn resistance to modernity as a feature. Breaking into that world requires something that goes beyond competitive specs, because specs are table stakes and loyalty is emotional. Hyundai has spent forty years earning American trust one rational purchase at a time, and with the Boulder Concept, the brand is making its first bet on something less rational: the idea that a Korean automaker can build an object with genuine off-road soul.

The Boulder debuted as a surprise at the 2026 New York International Auto Show, carrying Hyundai’s first fully-boxed ladder-frame platform and a confirmed production midsize pickup by 2030 as its subtext. The design language is “Art of Steel,” a philosophy connecting the Southern California design team’s decisions directly to the material science of Hyundai’s own steel division. The concept wears 37-inch mud-terrain tires, coach-style rear doors, dual safari windows, and a double-hinged tailgate across a Liquid Titanium body that looks less like a design study and more like a declaration of intent.

Designer: Hyundai Design North America

From the front, the Boulder looks like it was designed by someone who spent more time on trails than in trend reports. The headlights are stacked in two rectangular modules, recessed deep into the bodywork so the surrounding steel reads as structure first and styling second. That bronze-toned horizontal slat grille sits between them like the face of something that has already decided it doesn’t need your approval. The hood carries a pronounced power dome, and the roof-mounted light bar integrates into the low-profile rack with steel webbing between the rails rather than getting bolted on as an afterthought. Design chief SangYup Lee described the approach as one that “celebrates the gaps,” treating the deliberate negative space between panels as a feature that exposes the construction logic rather than disguising it beneath flowing bodywork. Every recess, every shadow line, every recessed lamp housing is doing exactly that.

The side profile is where the Boulder’s proportions really land. The roofline is ruler-flat, the greenhouse is upright and nearly square, and the body sides are almost completely clean of character lines. Hyundai is generating all the visual mass through wheel arch geometry alone, with those flared cutouts punching hard against the otherwise minimal sheetmetal. Brad Arnold, Head of Hyundai Design North America, framed the whole project around restraint: “It’s a tool for getting to that sunset, to have that experience, not for distracting you from that moment.” That philosophy reads clearly in the silhouette. The short-wheelbase four-door proportion feels closer to a Defender 90 than anything in Hyundai’s current lineup, which is either a coincidence or the most confident piece of product positioning the brand has ever attempted.

Inside, Hyundai eliminated the conventional instrument cluster and center touchscreen entirely, replacing them with a pillar-to-pillar head-up display integrated across the base of the windshield, complemented by smaller dashboard-mounted screens and a modular “Bring Your Own Device” rail system for customizable digital interfaces. Physical knobs and grab bars handle the high-frequency controls, fold-out tray tables serve field lunches and laptop sessions equally, and a software-driven off-road guidance system acts as what Hyundai calls a digital spotter riding shotgun. The cabin avoids the trap of over-digitization without tipping into retro nostalgia theater. That balance is harder to strike than it looks.

The body-on-frame platform is engineered to accept pure electric, internal combustion, and hybrid configurations, giving Hyundai maximum flexibility to match market conditions when production begins. Industry signals point toward an extended-range electric setup pairing electric drive with a gasoline generator, a configuration that Scout Motors and Ram are both pursuing for similar reasons: EV torque on the rocks, combustion range in the backcountry. No horsepower figures, no confirmed engine lineup, no price. Hyundai is keeping the powertrain conversation deliberately vague, and given that production is four years out, that restraint is as strategic as it is honest.

The Boulder arrives backed by an $18.4 billion US manufacturing commitment, with the production truck confirmed to be designed and built in America. That context matters for a brand entering a segment where provenance and identity carry weight that no press release can manufacture. The Wrangler’s tribal loyalty was built over decades and through genuine capability. Hyundai knows the Boulder has to earn that the same way, one trail at a time. If the production truck keeps even half of this concept’s architectural confidence and design clarity, that process has a very credible starting point.

The post 37-Inch Tires, Body-On-Frame, No Touchscreen: Hyundai’s Boulder Concept Should Make Jeep Nervous first appeared on Yanko Design.