Most of us abandon a project after a few weeks of frustration. Olivier Gomis sat on one for five years, then came back and finished it. The Bowl Curved Pursuit is Gomis’s latest release, a handcrafted woodturning that looks, at first glance, like it was generated by some algorithmic design software rather than made by two hands in a workshop. The curves twist and rotate in a way that feels almost mathematically precise, each wood segment following the one before it in a pattern that spirals elegantly around the bowl’s body. It’s the kind of object that makes you look twice, then a third time, trying to work out how it was actually made. That’s kind of the point.
Gomis, a French woodturner and furniture maker, has been building a reputation for designs that sit right at the edge of what woodworking is supposed to look like. His work doesn’t whisper “rustic” or “farmhouse.” It says something closer to “sculpture” and means it. His portfolio spans coloured pencil vases, massive segmented bowls, and geometric pieces that wouldn’t look out of place in a contemporary design gallery. But the Curved Pursuit feels like a moment of arrival, a design he clearly couldn’t let go of until he got it right.
The process is deceptively methodical. Gomis built the bowl by gradually stacking and rotating wood pieces before cutting them on a table saw, then mounted the entire structure on a lathe and carved it into its final form. That sequence, stacking, rotating, cutting, turning, sounds simple enough until you consider how much precision is required at every stage. A miscalculation in the rotation angle and the whole pattern collapses into something ordinary. The five-year gap between conception and completion makes a lot more sense once you understand those margins.
What gets me about this bowl is how visible the thinking is. You can trace the logic of the design just by looking at it. The segments aren’t decorative afterthoughts, they’re structural decisions, each one informing the curve that follows. For a piece of functional decor, that’s a rare quality. Most objects in this category are either beautiful or interesting. The Curved Pursuit manages to be both, and does it without trying to explain itself.
The price sits at $372 USD, available to order on commission. That number might give some people pause, but I’d argue it’s almost suspiciously reasonable for what you’re getting. This isn’t a production piece pulled from a conveyor belt. It’s a hand-built object that required five years of problem-solving to even exist. Commissioning one means you’re essentially getting a slice of a very specific creative obsession, which is not something that ends up on most people’s shelves by accident.
There’s also a broader conversation happening here about craft in the age of mass production. We live at a moment when almost anything can be printed, extruded, or manufactured at scale, and yet the appetite for handmade objects keeps growing. Not out of nostalgia exactly, but out of a genuine desire to own something that carries a human fingerprint. Gomis’s work taps directly into that. His YouTube channel documents every step of his process with no shortcuts hidden, which is both a smart move and a generous one. Watching him work makes the finished objects more meaningful, not less. You come away from his videos understanding not just how a piece was made, but why it matters.
The Bowl Curved Pursuit is the kind of design that rewards attention. It doesn’t immediately give everything away. The more you sit with it, the more the geometry reveals itself, the precision, the patience, the particular stubbornness it takes to return to something after five years and finally decide it’s ready. Somewhere between design and craft, between art object and kitchen counter, Gomis has made something genuinely hard to categorize. If that sounds like a compliment, it is.
Most great design doesn’t need a second chance. It gets one take to impress you, and either you connect with it or you don’t. But occasionally, a design is so fundamentally right that it earns the rare privilege of being revisited, and when that moment arrives, the update feels less like a revision and more like a long-awaited answer to a question nobody thought to ask. The VARIABLE Monochrome is that answer.
The original VARIABLE chair was designed by Norwegian industrial designer Peter Opsvik in 1979, and it landed with mixed reactions. The premise was strange by conventional furniture standards: tilt the seat forward, add a knee rest, redistribute the body’s weight, and let the spine decompress naturally. It didn’t look like a chair. It didn’t feel like sitting. But it worked, and that mattered more than aesthetics. Forty-five years later, it’s the most popular chair in the Varier collection, which tells you everything you need to know about the long game good design plays.
Designer: Peter Opsvik
Now the VARIABLE Monochrome takes that story a step further. This isn’t a redesign or a departure from the original. It’s a chromatic celebration of it. Varier has reimagined the chair in a palette of five distinct colorways: Forest, Poppy, Plum, Marine, and Grotto. Each one offers a seamless transition from the wooden runners to the upholstered surfaces, so the chair reads as a single sculptural object rather than a sum of separate parts. The result is that the VARIABLE looks, arguably for the first time, like it was designed not just to be used but to be admired. That shift matters more than it might seem.
The choice of materials is worth a mention because it adds a layer of integrity to what might otherwise read as a purely aesthetic update. The upholstery is a knitted textile made from 100% recycled polyester, sourced entirely from post-consumer plastic waste and OEKO-TEX certified. The wooden runners are beech and ash plywood, finished with a water-based lacquer. Varier backs the whole thing with a 10-year guarantee, which is a bold commitment for any furniture maker. It suggests a confidence in the design that I respect.
Opsvik’s philosophy has always been rooted in movement. Traditional chairs, the argument goes, force your body into a single fixed position and then leave you to manage the consequences. The VARIABLE was designed to invite variation instead, gently encouraging the sitter to shift between kneeling and more upright postures without even thinking about it. You don’t sit in this chair so much as you settle into a quiet collaboration with it. That core experience hasn’t changed. What Monochrome adds is the sense that this chair now has a personality to match its purpose.
The VARIABLE Monochrome was named a winner of the BIG SEE Product Design Award 2026, which feels right. Design awards tend to follow where cultural attention has already landed, and there’s been a quiet but consistent reappraisal of ergonomic furniture happening across interior design circles. The pandemic-era focus on home office setups opened up conversations about how we actually sit and what our furniture is doing to our bodies over time. Pieces like the VARIABLE suddenly had a wider audience ready to receive them.
Peter Opsvik passed away in 2024, making this version of his most iconic design something of a posthumous tribute as much as a commercial release. That context doesn’t change how the chair performs, of course, but it does make the whole thing feel more weighted with intention. Varier continues to work closely with his team, and the VARIABLE Monochrome reads as a genuinely affectionate send-off to a designer who spent his entire career asking a question most people never thought to ask: what if the chair worked for the body, and not the other way around?
It’s rare that a piece of furniture can make you rethink both how you sit and how you see a room. The VARIABLE Monochrome quietly does both. That’s the mark of design that was never really finished. It was just waiting for its moment in color.
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The rechargeable table lamp has been around for a while, but it hasn’t always been something designers were excited to work on. For most of its life, it was a category of hotel patios and restaurant terraces, objects tolerated for their practicality and forgiven for looking like camping gear. Most of them leaned on lantern shapes, chunky handles, and rubberized finishes that communicated utility before anything else.
That started to change noticeably around Milan Design Week 2026, when the cordless lamp stopped being a hospitality accessory and became something designers were treating as a proper object type. Alexander Pott did one for IKEA’s PS Collection. Studiopepe built an entire lamp family around it for Rakumba. Patrick Jouin wrapped one in micro-perforated leather for Longchamp. Suddenly, the rechargeable table lamp had a design argument behind it.
IKEA PS 2026 brings Alexander Pott’s cordless lamp to the mainstream
There’s a certain logic to watching what IKEA does with its PS Collection. The line has a history of giving up-and-coming designers a platform to push against convention, which means that when a rechargeable lamp shows up there, it’s worth paying attention. It signals that portable lighting has moved far enough into the mainstream that it deserves a considered, well-designed answer at an accessible price point.
Alexander Pott’s design for the IKEA PS 2026 line keeps things deceptively simple: a metal-and-glass body with three dimming levels and a battery that frees you from thinking about where the nearest socket is. It comes in a few color combinations that make it feel more playful than precious, and it’s light enough to move from a dining table to a windowsill without making it a whole thing.
Studiopepe’s Torre family gives Rakumba a fully rechargeable lamp line
One-off cordless lamps are easy enough to find, but a whole family of them built around a consistent design language is something else. It suggests that whoever made it isn’t treating the rechargeable lamp as an afterthought or a novelty but as a genuine product category worth investing in. That’s the kind of thinking Studiopepe brought to their Torre line for Rakumba, and it shows.
The Torre family doesn’t try to hide what it is. The forms are clean and architectural, built for spaces where the lighting is meant to feel intentional rather than improvised. The concealed light source keeps it calm in a room, and being rechargeable means it can move between an indoor shelf and an outdoor table without losing any of that composure in the process.
Ostara is what happens when Longchamp and Patrick Jouin design a lamp together
Fashion and luxury brands don’t wander into product design unless they see a genuine opportunity to say something with the object. The result is usually either impressive or awkward, with little in between. With Ostara, Longchamp and Patrick Jouin landed on the right side of that line, producing a rechargeable lamp that feels less like a lifestyle extension and more like a considered design object.
Jouin used micro-perforated leather for the shade, which gives the light that comes through it a texture that’s harder to achieve with glass or plastic. Being wireless and rechargeable means it can sit on a dining table or a bedside surface without the visual interruption of a cord, which matters more in a lamp built around intimacy and atmosphere than around raw output.
IKEA AVHÅLL goes outdoors without looking like it belongs there
There’s a frustrating design problem at the heart of most outdoor-rated portable lamps. They want to be taken seriously as practical objects, so they usually adopt a rugged aesthetic that makes them look slightly out of place indoors. Bringing one in from the balcony feels like dragging a piece of patio furniture into the living room, which is exactly the kind of visual compromise most people don’t want to make.
The AVHÅLL handles that transition more gracefully than most. It’s a metal lamp with three dimming settings and enough weather tolerance to live on a terrace, but it doesn’t dress itself up in tactical styling or rubberized finishes to make that point. At $39.99, it’s the kind of object that can light an outdoor dinner, come back inside afterward, and not look out of place in either setting.
The Anywhere-Use Lamp makes the case for AA batteries over built-in cells
Not every cordless lamp needs to carry a built-in battery to justify its place in this conversation. The Anywhere-Use Lamp makes a different kind of case: four AA batteries instead of a sealed internal cell, which sounds like a step backward until you factor in that rechargeable AAs are widely available, easy to swap, and don’t degrade the way built-in batteries do after a couple of years of daily use.
It moves freely between a desk, a bookshelf, a bedside table, or an outdoor corner without needing a socket or a charging cable. Four brightness levels cycle through a tap of the cap, and the whole thing breaks down flat when you need to pack it. At $149, it isn’t cheap, but the placement freedom it offers is the kind that genuinely changes how you think about where light belongs.
Melt is one of the more dramatically finished lamps on this list
Once the rechargeable lamp stopped having to justify itself as a practical solution, designers had more room to get expressive. The form no longer had to be neutral or apologetic, which opened the door for objects that could hold their own in a room even when they weren’t switched on. That’s a higher bar than most lamps are held to, and one worth reaching for.
Melt leans into that idea pretty directly. Its surface treatment mimics the look of metal mid-pour, giving it a kind of arrested-motion quality that makes it genuinely interesting to have around. It also runs for up to 10 hours on a single charge, which means it can handle a long evening without going dark before the conversation does. At around $300, it’s the most overtly expressive lamp on this list.
Monir skips the app, the cord, and all the usual complications
There’s a growing exhaustion with lamps that want to be smart home hubs. At some point, the dimming app, the voice controls, and the tunable spectrum start feeling like overhead for something that’s supposed to quietly light a corner of the room. Not every lamp needs to be a connected device, and it’s becoming clearer that the most relaxed interiors are often lit by the least complicated objects.
Monir makes no effort to be anything other than a lamp. No app required, no cord in sight, and the whole thing is built from 100% recycled aluminum, which gives it a quieter kind of design intention than most objects in this space. Its moon-inspired form is soft enough to fit into a bedroom or reading corner without demanding attention, just providing a warm, ambient glow when you need it.
Fluted questions what the portable lamp’s silhouette should look like
The lantern is the oldest visual reference point in portable lighting, and it’s also one of the hardest to escape. Designers keep reaching for it because it signals mobility and self-sufficiency, but it also carries a lot of campsite and emergency-preparedness baggage that’s difficult to shed. Younger designers seem more interested in questioning those associations rather than just refining them, which is where things get more interesting.
Fluted, a student project recognized at the Core77 Design Awards, does exactly that. It borrows the lantern’s silhouette but softens its edges and refines its finish into something that reads less like outdoor gear and more like an object you’d actually want to keep on a shelf. It’s a concept rather than something you can order today, but it points at where the category’s visual language could go next.
The FSL Wireless Portable Desk Lamp doesn’t know which category it belongs to
Desk lamps and table lamps have always played by slightly different rules. A desk lamp is positioned and pointed; a table lamp is placed and left alone. That distinction made a lot of sense when both types were tethered to a wall, but it starts to feel less rigid when the power source is no longer doing the work of keeping the object in one place.
The FSL Wireless Portable Desk Lamp sits comfortably in that gap. It carries the directed functionality of a task light with the portability of an object that doesn’t belong to any single corner of the room. It can move from a desk to a dining table to a nightstand without asking for a socket along the way, which quietly makes the case for what cordless lighting could become.
Apple is working on its next-generation budget-friendly laptop, the MacBook Neo 2, the successor to the immensely popular MacBook Neo. While the exterior design remains consistent with its predecessor, the new model introduces significant internal upgrades, including a more powerful processor, increased memory, and expanded storage. Scheduled for release in early 2027, the MacBook Neo […]
Monochrome is that answer.
