Tag Archives: Furniture

The Coat Rack With a Face Nobody Knew They Needed

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Every apartment has one corner that swallows things. Mine has swallowed umbrellas, gym bags, and for years, whatever coat happened to end up hanging on the back side of the rack, out of reach unless I dragged the whole thing away from the wall first. That is the quiet, unglamorous flaw baked into almost every coat rack ever made. It works fine until you need the jacket on the far side, and then you are either yanking furniture around or reaching behind it like you dropped your keys down the couch. You would think after all these decades of furniture design somebody would have solved that small annoyance by now, and yet most coat racks still ask you to work around them instead of the other way around.

Sophia Lampropoulou, the Athens based designer behind 3D Season, apparently got tired of the same problem and did something about it. Her piece, called Smile, is a floor standing coat rack that rotates a full 360 degrees, so instead of moving the rack to get to your coat, you just spin the head and the coat comes to you. It sounds almost too simple to be worth calling a design breakthrough, until you realize how long we have all quietly tolerated the alternative.

Designer: Sophia Lampropoulou (3D Season)

What actually makes Smile worth talking about is not just the rotation, though. The head is 3D printed and shaped like a smiling face, with an internal mechanism that lets it spin smoothly, while the arms that hold the clothes are made of natural wood. That combination matters more than it might seem on paper. Most furniture that leans on 3D printing ends up looking like a tech demo, all sharp edges and plastic sheen. Lampropoulou avoided that trap by pairing the printed core with actual wood, so the final object reads as warm and almost handmade, not like something that rolled straight out of a lab.

The face is the part that will either charm you or feel unnecessary, depending on your taste, and I will admit I landed on charmed. A coat rack has no obligation to have a personality. It is one of the most forgettable objects in a home, tucked into an entryway where nobody looks twice. Giving it an expression, even a simple printed smile, turns it into something you notice on your way out the door instead of something you walk past. That is a small trick, but it is the kind of small trick that separates furniture people actually enjoy owning from furniture that simply exists. It is a reminder that function and personality were never actually in competition to begin with.

There is also a practical case underneath the playful one. Smile ships flat pack and assembles without much fuss, which sounds like a footnote until you have moved a coat rack across a city and realized how awkward those things are to transport in one piece. Durability was clearly part of the brief too, since a rotating mechanism that wobbles or jams after a month would undo the entire point of the design.

The design world noticed. Smile picked up a win at the A’ Design Award in the 3D printed forms category and an honorable mention at the DNA Paris Design Awards, which is a respectable pair of nods for a piece this modest in scope. Coat racks rarely get awards attention, mostly because nobody expects them to solve anything. Lampropoulou treated an object most of us ignore as a real design problem, and that decision is exactly what earned the recognition.

At around 280 euros, Smile is not an impulse buy, and I would not pretend it is the answer to every cramped entryway out there. But it is a good example of what happens when a designer refuses to accept that a boring object has to stay boring. The best home goods rarely announce themselves loudly. They just quietly fix something you had stopped noticing was broken, and Smile does exactly that, one slow spin at a time.

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A Side Table That Actually Hides Books in Plain Sight

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Most side tables are liars. They show up looking clean, then gradually become the household surface nobody planned for: stacked magazines, a charging cable, three remote controls, and that one book you’ve been meaning to finish for six weeks. The table itself never had a real answer for any of it, just a flat top and occasionally a drawer that rattles. The clutter isn’t a behavior problem. It’s a design problem, and most furniture refuses to admit it.

Liam de la Bedoyere, the designer behind Bored Eye Design, built the Nudge Side Table around a different premise. The storage isn’t added to the table. It is the table. A thick cylindrical column of stacked plywood discs rises straight up, and near the top, two large circular platforms sit at slightly different heights, offset from each other just enough to open a horizontal slot between them. That slot fits a book. No drawer, no shelf bracket, no hinge. The gap does the work, and the gap only exists because one disc was deliberately nudged out of alignment with the other.

Designer Name: Liam de la Bedoyere (boredeye design)

The material choice earns its place here. Plywood is not a compromise; it’s a decision. Looking at the cylindrical body of the Nudge table, every individual layer is exposed on the curved surface, running around the column in thin parallel lines like growth rings on a cross-section of a tree. Up close, the texture reads almost geological, warm and stratified, with the natural variation in the pine grain showing through the smooth flat tops of both platforms. From above, the two circles overlap partially in a configuration that looks less like furniture and more like a Venn diagram drawn by someone who actually cared about geometry.

The proportions matter a lot here. The column is wide enough to feel substantial without being squat, and tall enough that the offset platforms land at a genuinely useful height next to a sofa or armchair. The upper disc sits slightly higher and further back; the lower disc projects forward, and the book rests in the slot between them, its spine flush with the edge. From the front, a bright red cover peeking out of the gap adds exactly the kind of color accent the natural pine needs. De la Bedoyere didn’t paint anything or add contrast artificially. He let the objects that live on the table do that instead, which is a confident move.

From certain angles, the silhouette is almost totemic. Two thick circles floating above a ribbed cylinder, slightly misaligned, the book suspended horizontally between them. It photographs like sculpture, but it functions without any instruction required. You look at it and immediately understand where the book goes. That kind of instant legibility is harder to achieve than it sounds, especially when the mechanism is structural rather than applied.

I keep thinking about what this table refuses to include. No joinery hardware buried inside the column. No shelf underneath with a lip to prevent things from sliding off. No rubber feet dressed up in brushed metal. The cylindrical form is self-contained, the platforms are the table, and the offset between them is the storage. Every potential addition was apparently considered and then left out, which is a discipline that most furniture design at any price point genuinely struggles with.

De la Bedoyere has been working through this problem across several pieces now. His Notch table earlier this year carved a vertical slot into a set of solid wooden legs for the same purpose. The Nudge table arrives at a similar conclusion through a completely different construction logic, stacking instead of subtracting, horizontal storage instead of vertical, two surfaces instead of one. Same stubbornness about keeping things elemental, different answer.

Side tables rarely attract this level of structural thinking. They get treated as the afterthought of the living room, bought last and replaced first. The Nudge table argues that the piece sitting closest to how you actually spend your time at home deserves more than a flat top and a prayer. Sometimes the most useful thing a designer can do is move one circle slightly to the left and let the gap speak for itself.

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This Lounge Chair Is Built From Cork — and It’s Sturdier Than It Looks

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Cork is everywhere in design, and yet it’s almost always decorative. A tile floor. A pin board. A wine stopper. Copenhagen-based furniture designer Chiara Verde looked at that assumption and quietly dismantled it. Her Strata lounge chair doesn’t use cork as a finish — it uses cork as the architecture.

The chair is built around a layered composite system: thin cork sheets alternated with natural fibre textiles, laminated together to form load-bearing shells. The textile reinforcement isn’t there for aesthetics — it gives the cork directional stiffness and structural performance it simply doesn’t have on its own. A minimal metal frame handles only the points under concentrated load, leaving the cork shells to carry the rest. It reads, visually, like a chair slung from material intelligence rather than convention.

Designer: Chiara Verde

Verde’s background leans heavily into process. Her practice is built on material experimentation, prototyping, and structural research — work that treats the studio bench as an extension of the design itself. Strata wasn’t conceived and then executed. It emerged through months of testing, adjustment, failure, and recalibration. A cork stool came first — a full-scale testbed that validated the structural logic before Verde committed it to a larger form. The lounge chair is the result of everything that came before it.

What makes Strata worth paying attention to isn’t just the material provocation — it’s how restrained the final form is. The chair doesn’t announce itself. It holds the visual language of the natural world: organic in silhouette, warm in texture, quietly confident in its proportions. Cork has an inherent thermal quality to it, a softness underfoot and underhand that synthetic materials spend millions trying to replicate. Here, it’s simply doing its job.

The lineage of the slung chair runs deep — leather over steel tubing defined a generation of modernist seating in the early and mid-20th century. Verde is working in that same formal territory, proposing laminated cork as the next honest alternative to leather: a material that gives, breathes, and ages with use rather than against it.

Strata sits in a growing conversation around material-led design — not sustainability as branding, but sustainability as methodology. Verde isn’t marketing cork. She’s interrogating it, and the chair is the proof of concept. For a material that has spent decades on the periphery of furniture design, Strata might be the argument it needed all along.

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Holy Moly Is the Swiss Army Knife of Flat-Pack Furniture Hardware

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Most flat-pack furniture ships with a plastic bag full of different screws, dowels, and brackets, each one doing exactly one job and nothing else. The Holy Moly Cabinet throws that entire parts bag away in favor of a single connector, a clover-shaped orange fitting that turns into a door pull, a leg, a hinge, and a shelf bracket depending on where it gets mounted. One piece of hardware ends up doing the work an entire drawer of assorted fasteners usually handles.

That fitting splits into two halves that snap together, and the design team baked its own name directly into the plastic rather than printing it on a box. The clover-shaped cap reads “HOLY” across its four petals, while the cylindrical stem underneath reads “MOLY” on its flat face. Pull the two apart, and the joke becomes obvious. Screw them together, and the joke disappears into a working piece of furniture hardware.

Designer: Liam de la Bedoyere (boredeye.design)

Every visible surface of the cabinet is a perforated steel panel, the kind of dense hole grid you’d expect on a pegboard rather than a piece of furniture. That choice turns the entire body into a mounting surface rather than just four solid walls, since the same connector can thread into practically any hole depending on where a shelf, a foot, or a door needs to land. Nothing about the placement is fixed once the manufacturing is done.

Standing the cabinet on its own four fittings turns it into a compact cube barely bigger than a nightstand, complete with a door pull mounted flush against the front panel and enough clearance underneath for airflow. Add a second cube on top using the same connectors at the seam, and the whole unit doubles in height without needing a different set of parts for the taller version. Scaling up means reordering the same hardware, not redesigning the furniture.

A shelf slots inside using that identical connector logic, locking into whichever row of holes puts it at the right height for whatever needs storing, whether that’s a stack of books or something taller that needs more headroom below it. Because the perforated steel body is the mounting surface everywhere, that shelf can move up or down later without drilling a single new hole or buying a different bracket to match a new position.

The perforation earns its keep beyond just anchoring the fittings. A pair of headphones hooks directly into the holes near the front panel with nothing extra required, treating the cabinet’s skin as a hanging surface the same way a pegboard in a garage holds tools. That’s a function most cabinets never offer, since a sealed door front usually has nowhere for anything to grab onto.

Reducing a whole cabinet’s hardware down to variations on one connector isn’t just a manufacturing shortcut. It changes how a piece of furniture ages in someone’s home, since a cracked foot or a worn door pull can be swapped using the exact same part sitting in a spare parts drawer, rather than hunting down a discontinued bracket from a company that stopped making that model years ago.

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This Chair Proves a $2.3M Hypercar & Your Living Room Have More in Common Than You Think

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Most furniture doesn’t have a backstory worth telling. The Maniac Chair does. It looks, from across the room, like it wandered out of a 1950s Danish design studio — until you get close enough to realize it’s built from the same bloodline as a $2.35 million hypercar.

Oilstainlab is the California-based studio founded by Ukrainian-born twins Iliya and Nikita Bridan — high school dropouts trained in Italy and California, responsible in their previous lives for 6.5 million street cars. In 2018, they started Oilstainlab with a single promise: never to be sane. The result was the HF-11, a limited-production hypercar of which only 25 will ever exist. The Maniac Chair is the furniture-world extension of that same obsession, sold through House Dé Stains, Oilstainlab’s lifestyle brand.

Designer: Oilstainlab

The chair’s shell is built on a CNC-machined aluminum frame wrapped in a hand-laid carbon fiber shell. That detail matters. Hand-laid carbon fiber isn’t a production shortcut — it’s the language of motorsport, of race seats and monocoques shaped around bodies doing 200 mph. Here, it’s shaped around a body doing nothing more than sitting. That deliberate mismatch is the whole point. The midcentury silhouette is familiar enough to read as furniture; the material is foreign enough to make you question what you’re actually looking at.

The name traces back directly to the HF-11, which Oilstainlab offered in an exclusive “Maniac” package for 11 of its 25 cars. The chair carries that identity forward — it’s not merchandise, it’s an extension of a design philosophy that treats excess and restraint as two sides of the same surface. The carbon fiber reads as raw and technical; the form reads as warm and considered. Neither cancels the other out.

What Oilstainlab has done here is something furniture designers rarely attempt, and automotive designers rarely bother with: they’ve made a chair that has genuine provenance. It isn’t inspired by cars in the way that means “we added some aggressive lines.” It shares DNA with an actual race seat.

The prep process before upholstery even echoes motorsport fabrication. For a studio built on the idea that sanity is optional, the Maniac Chair is a surprisingly coherent object. It knows exactly what it is — a piece of furniture for people who want to sit inside a design argument — and it doesn’t flinch.

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Finally, a Bench Design That Never Wastes a Seat

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Anyone who has ever sprinted through a train station with a rolling suitcase in one hand and a coffee sloppily balanced in the other knows the particular despair of scanning a row of seats and finding every single one occupied by someone’s backpack. Not a person. A bag. Sitting there like it paid for the ticket too.

That small, maddening moment is basically the whole reason a London studio called Of My Imagination designed something called Flip, a modular public seating system where each individual seat can rotate out of the way on command. Instead of a bench being a fixed slab of “sit here or don’t,” Flip treats every seat as its own hinge point. Flip it down, it’s a chair. Flip it up and out, it becomes open space for luggage, a stroller, or just more room to breathe when a platform gets crowded. It sounds almost too simple to be clever, which is usually the sign of a genuinely good idea.

Designer: Of My Imagination

I’ve been thinking about public seating a lot lately, mostly because so much of it seems designed for an idealized version of how people move through the world rather than the messy, unpredictable reality of it. Airports, bus terminals, hospital waiting rooms. These spaces swing between dead quiet and total chaos within the same hour, and yet the furniture almost never adjusts with them. A bench built for a slow Tuesday afternoon becomes a liability during a holiday rush, when every inch of floor space suddenly matters and immovable seating just gets in the way.

Flip’s answer isn’t flashy. There’s no app, no motor, no sensor deciding when a seat should move. It’s a mechanical latch and a rotating joint, the kind of low-tech solution that feels almost old-fashioned in a moment when everything gets pitched as “smart.” I actually like that restraint. Public infrastructure breaks down constantly not because the technology is too simple, but because it’s too complicated, too fragile, too dependent on software updates and maintenance contracts nobody budgeted for. A seat that flips because a person physically flips it is a seat that still works during a power outage, a system failure, or just a Tuesday when the maintenance crew is short-staffed.

The pandemic-era spacing rules get a mention in OMI’s own description of the project, and it’s worth sitting with that for a second. Remember all those benches wrapped in caution tape or marked with awkward stickers telling you where not to sit? Most of that signage disappeared once the emergency did, but the underlying problem never really left. Public seating still needs to flex between “pack people in tightly” and “spread them out,” whether that’s for health reasons, accessibility needs, or just the reality of rush hour versus a quiet Sunday morning.

What strikes me most is how much this design respects the intelligence of the people using it. Flip doesn’t try to predict what a traveler needs. It just gives them the option and gets out of the way. That’s a surprisingly rare quality in public design, where the instinct is often to over-engineer a solution that anticipates every scenario instead of trusting a commuter to make a simple physical adjustment themselves.

Is it going to replace every bench in every transit hub across the country? Probably not right away, and cost, durability testing, and vandalism resistance are the unglamorous hurdles any concept like this has to clear before it shows up somewhere you’d actually sit down. But as a proof of concept, it’s a refreshing reminder that flexibility doesn’t require a screen or a subscription. Sometimes it just requires a hinge and a little humility about how unpredictable public spaces actually are.

The next time I’m standing in a crowded terminal, silently negotiating personal space with a stranger’s overstuffed duffel bag, I’ll probably think about Flip. Not because it solves everything, but because it solves the one thing that’s been sitting there, unaddressed, for as long as public benches have existed.

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A Teen Bedroom Has 4 Jobs, the Hasuit Corner Bed Handles All of Them

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A teenager’s bedroom has to do the work of four rooms at once: a place to sleep, a place to study, a place to charge every device they own, and a place to stash the clutter that inevitably piles up. The Hasuit Twin Corner Bed with Desk and Storage Bookcase tackles that problem by refusing to separate any of it, folding a bed frame, a desk, a bookcase headboard, and a charging station into one L-shaped footprint that claims a corner instead of a wall.

That corner-hugging shape is the real trick here. Rather than lining a bed and a desk up against separate walls and losing floor space to the gap between them, the frame wraps around the room’s dead corner, turning an awkward, often-wasted angle into the single most productive spot in the bedroom. At 97.1 inches long and 47.5 inches wide, it claims real estate efficiently rather than sprawling across it.

Designer: Hasuit

The desk sits at the foot of the bed rather than off to the side, wide enough for all your study needs: homework on one half, a laptop on the other. Three desk-side organizer pockets keep pens, cables, and notebooks within arm’s reach without cluttering the actual work surface, while a top storage shelf and matching headboard shelf give a spot for whatever needs to sit somewhere other than the floor.

Behind the headboard, six built-in bookshelves replace what would otherwise be a separate bookcase bought and assembled on its own. Add two under-bed drawers and two movable fabric storage bins, and the frame ends up handling the job of a dresser as much as a bed, all without eating into the room’s remaining walkable space.

A built-in charging station puts two AC outlets and two USB ports directly onto the bed frame itself, closing the gap between where a teenager sleeps and where their devices actually charge overnight. No more dragging an extension cord across the floor or reaching over the side of the mattress to find an outlet in the dark.

RGB lighting rounds out the package, offering more than 60,000 color options controllable through either a physical button or a companion app, with dedicated music, microphone, and timer modes layered in. It’s the kind of feature that reads as a gimmick until you remember how much a bedroom’s mood depends on lighting, especially for someone who treats their room as a study space, a hangout spot, and a bedroom all at once.

Engineered wood panels and metal slats hold the whole structure together, rated to support up to 600 pounds without a box spring required underneath. That combination of steel-reinforced practicality and genuinely useful built-in features is what separates this from a bed frame with accessories bolted on as an afterthought.

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Steel Pipe Stool That Never Uses a Single Weld or Screw

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I’ve seen a lot of stool designs that call themselves minimal and still hide a dozen fasteners under the seat. Yuval Meron’s Pipe Stool actually earns the word, and once you look closely at how the pieces meet each other, you start to appreciate it as a piece of design rather than just a fabrication trick.

The whole object reads as a single ribbon of steel that got folded, twisted, and locked into place. Look at where the seat cylinder meets the legs and you’ll notice small teardrop shaped holes and hook cutouts, cut with a laser before the metal was ever bent. Those cutouts aren’t decoration. They’re the joinery. One piece hooks through another and the tension of the bent steel holds everything tight, so the stool clicks together almost like a puzzle piece finding its slot. It’s a quiet bit of engineering that never announces itself, because from a few feet away it just looks like clean negative space.

Designer: Yuval Meron

The silhouette itself is what actually pulls me in. A rolled cylinder seat sits on top of two angled legs that splay out from a single central column, giving the whole thing a stance closer to a sawhorse or a gymnast’s pommel horse than a traditional four legged stool. That tripod like base means the stool never wobbles, even though it looks like it’s balancing on almost nothing. There’s something satisfying about a design that looks precarious and turns out to be the opposite.

Meron shows the Pipe Stool in a few finishes, and the variations tell you a lot about what this piece is trying to be. There’s a raw galvanized version, left with the mottled, slightly industrial sheen of unfinished steel, screws and seams visible on purpose rather than hidden away. Then there are the powder coated versions in navy and a deep red, which flatten the metal into a single confident color and make the stool feel more like a finished furniture object than a prototype. Seeing all three side by side, the raw metal, the navy, the red, makes clear this isn’t a one off art piece. It’s a system that can dress up or stay stripped down depending on where it needs to live.

The seat itself is the one part of the stool that isn’t steel. A padded cylindrical bolster, upholstered in a nubby woven fabric that echoes the tube shape underneath it, gets seated into the folded metal collar at the top. In the green version the fabric has almost a felted, sweater like texture, which is a smart contrast against all that cold, cut steel below it. It’s the kind of detail that makes you want to actually touch the thing before you sit on it, and honestly, that tension between soft seat and hard structure might be the most successful design decision in the whole piece.

What I appreciate most is that none of this needed extra parts to make it feel resolved. No visible bolts holding the seat to the base, no bracket doing quiet unglamorous work underneath. The hook and slot joints do the structural job, the powder coat or galvanized finish does the aesthetic job, and the upholstered bolster does the comfort job. Three problems, three simple solutions, no overlap.

I also like that Meron didn’t try to disguise the process. You can see exactly where the pipe was cut, exactly where it folds, exactly how one leg locks into the next. A lot of designers would sand that story away and pretend the object arrived whole. This one lets you read the making of it right there on the surface, which turns a stool into something closer to a diagram of its own construction.

It’s still a student project, and it may never make it past a handful of prototypes in a handful of colors. But it’s a genuinely good looking object regardless of where it ends up, one that manages to look sculptural and structural at the same time, and that’s a harder balance to strike than people give it credit for.

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Yinka Ilori Finally Told the Story of Chairs Nobody Wanted

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

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

Designer: Yinka Ilori

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

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

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

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

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

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This Chinese Stool Hides 2 Storage Bins Right Under Your Seat

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When I sit in a really comfortable chair or couch, there are times when it’s genuinely hard to get up and grab something I need. Half the time, I wish every seat came with built-in storage, so that before I even sit down, everything I need is already within arm’s reach. I’d just have to reach down or reach to the side instead of hauling myself up off the cushions.

This “turtle stool” from China might just be the chair of my dreams, as long as I don’t mind sitting close to the floor. It’s a molded seat mounted on top of a low crate frame built from aluminum extrusions, basically a hybrid of a stool and a storage bin that can also roll around the room whenever you need it to. The stool comes from designer Qingshan, whose work centers on modular, industrial-style furniture built almost entirely from aluminum extrusion systems.

Designer: Qingshan

At a glance, the turtle stool has a smooth, rounded, molded seat sitting atop a low, boxy frame, and that shape is exactly why it earned its nickname. The rounded top paired with the low, shell-like base gives the whole thing a squat, turtle-like silhouette, and it’s a design detail that makes the stool instantly recognizable and a little bit charming.

Instead of the wood, plastic, or steel tubing you’d typically find on a stool like this, the base is built entirely out of aluminum extrusions, the same modular aluminum bars used in workbenches, shelving units, and even 3D printer frames. That choice gives the stool a raw, industrial look, and it also means the frame can be engineered and reinforced without welding, since extrusion pieces bolt together using standardized connectors.

The best part, though, is what’s hiding inside that base: two separate storage bins built right into the frame. Whatever you need close at hand, tools, craft supplies, remote controls, or just general junk, can live inside the stool itself, tucked out of sight but always within reach. On top of that, the whole thing rolls on casters, so you can scoot from one side of the room to the other without ever actually standing up.

Looking at the stool, it’s probably too low and too compact to catch on in the American or European markets, where seating tends to sit higher off the ground. But in Asia, and in China specifically, a stool like this makes a lot of sense, since low seating is a much more familiar and accepted part of everyday furniture there. This piece also fits neatly into Qingshan’s broader body of work, which leans heavily on modular, industrial-feeling furniture like height-adjustable side tables and monitor risers.

It’s worth comparing the turtle stool to what’s already available in the U.S. market, and the closest match is probably IKEA’s RÅSKOG rolling utility cart, a wildly popular three-tier metal cart that people use for everything from kitchen storage to craft supplies to bathroom organization. IKEA’s version is polished, mass-produced, and instantly recognizable, but it’s built purely for storage and movement, not for sitting. On the flip side, mechanics and garage enthusiasts in the U.S. already use rolling shop stools with built-in storage trays, made by brands like Sunex, for the exact same reason Qingshan built this piece: so you don’t have to get up to grab a tool. The turtle stool essentially splits the difference between these two ideas, combining IKEA-style rolling storage with the seated comfort of a garage stool, wrapped in a much more playful, design-forward shell.

At the end of the day, the turtle stool is a clever little solution to a problem most of us don’t even realize we have until we’re stuck sitting on the couch, five feet away from the TV remote. It won’t replace your living room sofa, and it’s probably not headed for a mass American release anytime soon, but it’s a fun example of how a simple idea, comfort plus storage plus mobility, can turn into a genuinely useful piece of furniture. Sometimes the best designs really are the odd ones.

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