This Thames-Side House Rises With Floodwater Instead of Fighting It

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From the riverbank in Buckinghamshire, Formosa does not immediately look like a piece of experimental engineering. That restraint is part of its appeal. Designed by Baca Architects along the River Thames, the 225-square-metre, three-storey home has the pitched roof, generous glazing, and garden relationship of a contemporary riverside house. For most of the year, that is exactly how it behaves. The unusual part is buried beneath it. Formosa sits inside a concrete wet dock and has been designed to leave the ground when the river rises.

The house was developed for a site within a designated flood zone, where building in the conventional sense presented a difficult choice. A permanently elevated house could have cleared projected flood levels, but doing so would have pushed the main living floor almost an entire story above the garden. Instead, Baca Architects designed the structure to remain close to the landscape during ordinary conditions and move only when the water makes movement necessary. The ground floor sits roughly 1 meter above ground level, preserving a much more immediate relationship between the house, its terraces, and the river beyond.

Designer: Baca Architects

Its mechanics are surprisingly straightforward. Beneath the building is a concrete pontoon that acts as a buoyant base. During a flood, water enters the surrounding concrete dock and gradually lifts the house. Four vertical guideposts, sometimes described as dolphins, keep the structure aligned as it rises, preventing it from drifting or rotating. Flexible service connections move with the building, allowing electricity and water services to remain connected as the house changes elevation. In its current configuration, Formosa can rise as much as 2.7 meters.  Baca Architects reports that during the severe winter floods of 2019 and 2020, the house rose and settled back down as intended.

What makes the project compelling is that the engineering does not demand constant attention from the people living inside it. There are relatively few moving parts. The river itself provides the force required to lift the building. As the dock fills, buoyancy does the work. The concrete base is engineered with enough weight and ballast to keep the structure stable, while the guideposts control its vertical movement. The system is tested periodically by filling the dock with water and checking the building’s ability to float safely. Formosa is less a machine disguised as a house than a house designed to understand the physical behavior of water.

The garden is part of that system too. Terraced levels create what Baca calls an intuitive landscape, allowing rising water to become visible before it reaches the house. Reeds, shrubs, lawn, and changing ground levels create an informal warning system that makes flood behavior readable through the landscape. Instead of treating water as something that must remain outside the boundaries of domestic life, Formosa builds an expected relationship with it.

The sectional logic reveals the project most clearly. Its main components can be read almost like a diagram of adaptation: solar shading, the pontoon beneath the house, the terraced garden, maintenance access, flexible connections, and a servicing hub. Each element has a fairly ordinary architectural or technical role. Together, they allow the entire building to change its position without fundamentally changing how it functions.

There is, of course, a cost attached to that adaptability. Baca has estimated that the amphibious system added around 20 percent compared with a similar conventional house with a basement. Specialized foundations, a wet dock, high water table construction, flexible utilities, and flood planning mean the idea is considerably more complex than simply placing a house beside a river. Yet the project makes an interesting argument about what that additional investment buys. Instead of permanently raising the architecture in anticipation of a rare event, the building maintains an everyday connection to the ground and reacts only when conditions demand it.

That distinction gives Formosa significance beyond its engineering novelty. It suggests that resilience does not always have to look defensive. Architecture facing environmental uncertainty can retreat, resist, or, in this case, move. From the garden, the house remains close enough to feel grounded. When the Thames rises, the section of the building quietly changes. The river lifts the house, the guideposts hold its position, the services travel with it, and once the water recedes, Formosa returns to exactly where it started.

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A $55 Camera Secretly Disguised as a Roll of 35mm Film

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Because I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, watching Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids lose their minds over stuff from those decades is honestly hilarious to me. It’s also making my back ache a little, if I’m being honest. But kidding aside, it’s genuinely fun to watch things like cassette tapes, typewriters, and old game consoles get a second life with a whole new generation. Analog cameras and their accompanying gear have been especially popular over the past few years. Now we’ve got something that flips the trend on its head: a fully digital device dressed up in analog clothing.

If you’ve ever handled an actual roll of 35mm film, the Analog Capsule Camera will look instantly familiar. But pick it up and take a closer look, and you’ll realize it’s not what it appears to be. As the name suggests, it’s actually a digital camera shaped like a roll of film, analog on the outside but fully digital on the inside. It’s a nostalgic way to document your life in a very digital age.

Click Here to Buy Now: $55

Even though it’s a digital camera, don’t expect image quality you can compare to what your phone produces. But that’s kind of the whole point. The 1-megapixel CMOS sensor is deliberately low-resolution, so you end up with grainy, soft photos with blown-out highlights, probably pretty close to what a lot of us remember from actual analog days. It’s a design choice, not a shortcoming. Like other keychain-style cameras on the market, this one is impressively light. At just 25 grams, it can weigh less than your average set of keys. That means you can clip it to your keychain, bag, belt loop, or wherever else you want a camera within arm’s reach. An included strap makes it that much easier to carry around, so it’s ready the moment something catches your eye.

Despite the featherweight build, the Analog Capsule still packs practical features. Photos save to a microSD card, so you’re not stuck fumbling with film rolls or waiting on a lab. A USB-C port handles both charging and photo transfers, and built-in digital playback lets you review a shot the second after you take it, something an actual film camera could never offer. In an era when most cameras brag about megapixel counts, sharpness, and endless feature lists, a lo-fi device like this feels like a breath of fresh air. The grain and blown highlights aren’t flaws to apologize for. They’re exactly what you’re paying for.

So how does it stack up against the competition? The closest rival is probably Kodak’s own Charmera, a similarly priced keychain camera that also leans into lo-fi digital photos rather than real film. Both cameras are chasing the same feeling: nostalgia without the hassle. Where the Analog Capsule pulls ahead is presentation. Its film-canister disguise and matching packaging make it a genuine conversation piece before you’ve even taken a photo, while the Charmera plays it more straightforward. If you’d rather skip digital altogether, Kodak also sells the EC35, a real 35mm point-and-shoot for about the same price, though you’ll be paying for film and developing on top of that. And if physical prints are what you’re after, Fujifilm’s Instax line remains the reigning champ, though you’ll spend more upfront and keep spending on film packs afterward. Compared to all of them, the Analog Capsule’s appeal is that it never asks you to buy another consumable again. Just point, shoot, and plug in.

At $55, the Analog Capsule Camera isn’t trying to replace your phone or your real vintage camera collection. It’s something else entirely: a tiny, playful object that turns picture-taking into a small ritual again, minus the cost and waiting that used to come with it. Whether you’re gifting it to the nostalgic Gen Xer in your life or handing it to a Gen Z kid who’s never actually shot on film but loves the aesthetic anyway, it manages to bridge two very different relationships with photography. And honestly, in a world of increasingly complicated cameras, there’s something refreshing about a device that just wants you to enjoy the grain.

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The Eggshell Lamp You Can Rearrange So You Never Buy Another

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I have a soft spot for lamps, but less patience for the way we buy them. Pick a shape, pick a spot, and hope both still make sense after the next move or furniture shuffle. If they don’t, the lamp goes into a closet and we start shopping again. Joanne Odisho’s Mod-u offers another option: a light designed to be rearranged as a room changes. Its most surprising feature is that the pieces are made from discarded eggshells.

Mod-u takes its name from “modular” and “you,” which tells you where Odisho wants the creative control to sit. The lamp is made from rearrangeable blocks, so its silhouette isn’t fixed when you first bring it home. One arrangement might feel right beside a sofa; another could give a bedroom a different focal point. I like that the design makes room for a change of mind. With most lighting, choosing the object means accepting its shape for as long as you own it. Here, that decision can be revisited.

Designer: Joanne Odisho

The blocks have a chunky, stacked quality that makes Mod-u look almost like a tabletop sculpture. That playfulness matters. Modular furniture can sometimes feel like a puzzle you have to solve before you’re allowed to enjoy it, but this looks inviting even before you understand how it works. Odisho has described the project as a lamp that can grow, shrink, and change with the spaces people inhabit. It’s easy to imagine adjusting it after a move, but also after a much smaller shift, like deciding that a corner needs less visual weight.

Then there are the eggshells. Odisho collects them from local cafés, sterilizes and dries them, and grinds them into a powder. Mixed with a biopolymer, the powder becomes a moldable material that sets without firing. She leaves the pieces to dry naturally for about a week. The finished blocks retain the subtle variations of the shells because she doesn’t add dye. That seems like the right call to me. The material has an origin worth seeing, and its warm, uneven tones give the lamp more character than a perfectly uniform finish would.

Eggshells are an appealing starting point, but they aren’t the whole story. A product can use discarded material and still become another object we tire of quickly. Mod-u’s more convincing sustainability argument is that its design gives an owner a reason to keep using it. Reconfiguration won’t make a lamp fit every room or every taste, and it doesn’t remove the need to think about the complete product at the end of its life. It does, however, challenge the assumption that wanting a fresh look requires buying a fresh object.

That’s also why Mod-u feels more interesting to me than a lamp that simply advertises its unusual ingredients. The eggshell composite catches your attention, but the invitation to rearrange the blocks is what might hold it. We often talk about adaptable design as though it’s purely functional, all efficiency and clever engineering. This has a more personal appeal. You can respond to your own space rather than trying to preserve the exact arrangement a designer photographed. The result may be less polished, but it would be yours.

Odisho’s idea has already received significant recognition: Mod-u won the 2026 Australian Furniture Design Award. The award includes an opportunity to work with furniture company Stylecraft toward commercial production, which makes the next step especially interesting. A compelling design concept has to survive the realities of making, selling, and using it at a larger scale. I’d be curious to see how much of Mod-u’s tactile, experimental quality carries through if it reaches more homes. That quality is central to its appeal, not a detail to smooth away.

For now, Mod-u offers a useful way to rethink a familiar household purchase. A lamp is often treated as the finishing touch, something you choose after the room is settled. But rooms rarely stay settled for long, and neither do the people living in them. Odisho has made a light that acknowledges both changes. The eggshells give it a memorable story; the movable pieces give it a reason to stay. Between those two ideas, Mod-u makes a thoughtful case for keeping what we own interesting a little longer.

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Halloween finally gets its own snow globe, and it’s made of LEGO

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The snow globe was invented by accident in 1900, when a Viennese surgical instrument mechanic named Erwin Perzy tried to build a brighter operating room lamp and ended up with a glass ball full of drifting semolina. Medicine’s loss was the gift shop’s gain. For the 125 years since, Christmas has hogged the format, filling every globe on the shelf with Santas, snowmen, and tiny trees. Halloween never got a turn, which feels unfair to the holiday that loves a spooky little scene trapped under glass. The Brick Artist just fixed that with the Halloween Snow Globe, a LEGO Ideas build that swaps snowfall for a creaky graveyard you can spin with a crank.

Inside the dome sits a twisted dead tree, a floating ghost, a jack-o’-lantern scarecrow, gravestones topped by a gargoyle, and a full moon peeking out from storm clouds. A Vampire minifig guards the front of the black base, arms out like a bouncer at the world’s smallest haunted nightclub. Turn the lever on the back and an internal gear mechanism rotates the whole scene 360 degrees, bringing a skeleton and a spider into view from behind the tombstones. The same builder gave us a spinning Christmas Snow Globe last December, so the setup might ring a bell. It’s the same clever chassis, now dressed for the other big holiday, and frankly it looks better in black.

Designer: The Brick Artist

A hand crank that spins the whole graveyard

The crank sticks out of the back of the base as a Technic axle with a tan handle, the kind of grip you’d expect on a music box. Turn it and gears hidden inside the black drum rotate the entire scene a full 360 degrees. The builder doesn’t spell out the gear layout, so the guts stay a mystery, but the renders show a clean hand-powered setup with no motors or batteries to fuss over. That keeps the base a tidy stage instead of a machine room. A crank also beats a shake, because nothing gets rattled loose and you control the drama.

My favorite detail, though, is where the skeleton and spider are parked. Both sit around the back of the scene, hidden behind the tombstones from the front, so the crank doubles as a reveal. That one placement gives the spin a reason to exist, hands whoever is turning it a tiny jump scare, and borrows the logic of a haunted house ride where the creepy stuff waits around the corner. Plenty of rotating displays just show you the same scene from another angle, while this one hides a punchline on the far side. It also means the globe looks different from every direction, which is rare for a decoration.

Brick-level tricks inside the dome

The tree is built from jointed black bars and clips, which lets its branches twist and reach in ways stacked bricks never could. The ghost hovers on a transparent stem above the gargoyle, so it floats like it’s up to no good. The scarecrow’s pumpkin head wears a top hat, and its coat is layered dark slopes that fake ragged, wind-tattered cloth. Behind it, a flat round moon is half covered by gray cloud plates, a cheap trick that sells an entire night sky. Check the render from behind and you’ll spot the moon’s bare studs, proof that it’s a stage prop built for the front row.

Autumn leaves do the job snow normally would. The ground is a patchwork of tan and gray round tiles, spiky reddish brown plants for dead brush, and orange and yellow leaf elements scattered between them. Those warm colors pop hard against an otherwise black and gray scene, like a Tim Burton still with one splash of orange. The base repeats the trick with wreaths of leaves and white flowers, plus a black spider and little web elements at the corners. The palette does the lighting work, since a mostly gray dome needs somewhere for your eye to land.

A Christmas classic with a Halloween Town makeover

LEGO already blessed this exact idea in 2024. When Simon Scott’s fan design became the 2,193 piece Nightmare Before Christmas set at $199.99, LEGO Ideas ran a contest asking builders to turn a Christmas classic into a Halloween version. The Brick Artist’s globe is that same swap with no prize pot attached. The Vampire up front looks a lot like the 2010 Collectible Minifigures Series 2 Vampire, a figure whose look later inspired Lord Vampyre in the 2012 Monster Fighters theme. Dracula standing guard at the front door is a very on-brand way to greet trick-or-treaters.

The Halloween Snow Globe was submitted on October 8, 2026, and as of October 9 it sat at 420 supporters (hehe) with 424 days left to reach the 1K milestone. LEGO Ideas runs on community votes: fans submit builds, supporters pile up, and LEGO decides which ones graduate into real boxes. Head to the LEGO Ideas page and give it your vote, because every supporter pushes it toward the next milestone.

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OnePlus wants to stick a tiny air conditioner on the back of its gaming phone

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Apple’s MagSafe, which returned on the iPhone 12 in 2020, turned the back of the phone into prime real estate. Wallets stuck on first, then grips, battery packs, and tripods (we rounded up the early MagSafe accessory wave in 2021), with Qi2 later pulling Android into the same magnetic party. The next resident, apparently, is a tiny air conditioner. Gaming phones and cooling fans have been dating for years, but those clip-ons were bulky and held on by spring clamps. A magnet-mounted cooler that sits flat like a card wallet is a more civilized take, and OnePlus is about to launch one.

The OnePlus Ice Card Mini follows the 68-gram Magnetic Ice Cooling Clip, which launched in March at 179 yuan (about $26) in China. The new one weighs about 1.8 ounces (50 grams) and measures 2.8 by 2.1 inches (70mm by 53.4mm), a footprint roughly 30% smaller, at 0.38 inches (9.7mm) thick. A thermoelectric cooling chip and an air-cooling system do the work, powered straight from the phone’s USB-C port. It debuts alongside the OnePlus 16 on October 12 at 7pm local time, and Oppo’s China store already lists it. Pricing and US availability have not been announced.

A mini-fridge chip and a tiny fan, squeezed into 0.38 inches

Thermoelectric (Peltier) coolers shuttle heat from one face of a small ceramic sandwich to the other whenever current runs through them. That leaves the hot side as the problem, so the Mini pairs its TEC chip with an air-cooling system that puts cold air where the phone runs hottest. The body mixes polycarbonate and aluminum alloy, measures 0.38 inches (9.7mm) thick, and bulges to 0.48 inches (12.3mm) around the air intake. Two settings sit at about 25dB and 35dB, closer to a whisper than a hair dryer. About 10 newtons of magnetic force holds it on.

We covered the Ice Speed Freezemat, a concept MagSafe charger that borrowed its cooling trick from the way the body sweats. The SHARGE Icemag then brought active cooling to the MagSafe power bank, and LISEN’s stand later tucked a fan into a desk object. The Mini strips the idea down to one job in a card-shaped body that draws at most 3.5W (5V at 0.7A) over USB-C. OnePlus’s earlier 27W and 40W coolers for China were far hungrier. That puts the Mini in the pocket-and-forget camp instead of the gaming-rig one, and I like that call.

No RGB, one status light, and a plate for phones without magnets

OnePlus’s 27W Ice Point clip from 2025 leaned on dual-color lighting for a gamer look. The Mini arrives in a single Silver Wing gray, with one status light that glows blue or green for the active mode and flashes red to flag a fault. That reads like a tool rather than a trophy, which suits a card-sized accessory you might actually leave in a bag. Nobody needs RGB on something that lives in a jacket pocket. The result is closer to a router’s blinking LED than a gaming rig’s light show.

A magnetic plate in the box extends the trick to Android phones and iPhones without built-in magnets. OnePlus and OPPO phones also get a pairing with the ColorOS X high-performance mode, so the home team gets a software handshake. Power can come from the phone, a power bank, or a wall adapter, so there is no proprietary port to hunt for. That plain USB-C approach suits a household of mixed phones. The pairing is the part I most want to see in action, since a cooler that talks to the phone beats a fan on a magnet.

Eight hours off a power bank turns a gaming gadget into travel gear

OnePlus says a 10,000mAh power bank can keep the Mini running for up to eight hours on high, which covers a long flight or a very committed gaming marathon. That detail turns the cooler into a field accessory, one that lives in a bag next to the power bank most of us already own. The math is believable, since 3.5W for eight hours is about 28Wh, and a 10,000mAh bank holds roughly 37Wh at nominal voltage. Add conversion losses and the claim lands right where physics says it should. Not bad for a gadget weighing 1.8 ounces.

Phones keep getting thinner and more powerful, and the thermal answer keeps shifting to a second object clinging to the back. OnePlus alone has announced at least four coolers in about eighteen months, from the 27W Ice Point to this 50-gram Mini. That cadence says the company sees cooling as a real accessory category rather than a gimmick. I would not be surprised if other brands copy the card-sized format. Cooling accessories could become the next thing everyone shrugs at until their navigation app turns the phone into a hand warmer.

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Wild Land PickupMate Trunk turns your pickup into two-story camping space at the push of a button

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If you’re like me, constantly looking for a new way to carry, camp, and explore with the pickup, chances are you’ve heard about Wild Land. Yes, the same manufacturer that brought the lightest, most spacious rooftop tent for an off-roader to Kickstarter. Now the manufacturer is playing it different, not just releasing a truck cap, but a versatile alternative that opens up a multi-story living space on the truck bed, which installs using a remote control or onboard control.

The Wild Land PickupMate Trunk, as the new camping solution from Wild Land is called, is designed for pickup owners who want more versatility without complicated modification. The Trunk thus turns the truck bed into a customizable space, ensuring that the original flexibility, usability, and off-road clearance remain unhindered.

Designer: Wild Land

Created with convenience in mind, the camping solution mounts onto the truck bed without drilling. Its lightweight folding structure installs with strong multi-point support. It can triple as a truck cap, rooftop tent, and a storage box, a combination that you will not get in any other alternative to the Trunk. Its dual-level layout is the striking aspect, which opens up the space from a box shape into a two-story living space, ideal for 2-3 people.

What makes the PickupMate Trunk really interesting is its electro-actuated scissor-lift frame that mounts onto the upper perimeter of the pickup bed. Instead of manually setting up an entire camp, you can expand or fold the structure in mere seconds at the push of a button. It supports remote and app control, making it easy to switch between the compact storage configuration and expanded living space whenever you want. Its folding structure also allows it to return to a compact form when the extra living space is not needed.

When it is deployed, the dual-level layout offers up to 9 feet of interior height, creating a spacious environment you would typically expect from a pickup bed setup. The first level provides a compact living area, while the second level expands into a larger space, with interior dimensions reaching 118 inches in length. Wild Land has also paid attention to the details that make a camping space more comfortable for camping, overlanding, hunting, and even fishing.

It has been provided with panoramic windows that allow natural light and ventilation, opening up the living area to the surroundings. Integrated lighting, power, and smart controls offer convenience, while a built-in 4.0 surround sound system means your entertainment is taken care of inside the Trunk.

The PickupMate Trunk comes in two versions: the smaller variant weighs 459 lbs, while the large version comes in at 485 lbs. When folded, the small model measures 67 x 59 x 24 inches, and the large version measures 73 x 59 x 24 inches, the company notes. The compact closed dimensions make travel more convenient and easy. The automatic setup of the camping solution, irrespective of the size, is powered by an 86.4Wh battery, which supports approximately six setup cycles. This allows users to operate the lifting and folding system without having to manually handle the change its configuration.

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This plastic stool is a giant Esc key, and it hides your clutter

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I have a soft spot for objects nobody bothers to credit, and the plastic stool might be the champion of them. It’s the monobloc chair’s shorter, scrappier cousin, and it gets about half the respect. You’ll find it at night markets, under kitchen sinks, and propping open a door somewhere in Asia. Nobody can name the person who designed it. Every few years a design student gives it a glow-up, and then it goes right back to being ignored.

This time the glow-up comes with a joke. Dream Research Society, a Chinese product studio, turned the stool into a giant Esc keycap, complete with tapered sides and a little white ESC legend. The top pops off like a lid, so the stool also hides your shoes, toy bricks, or that one box of cables you swear you’ll sort someday. The designer says you can buy it now on major Chinese e-commerce platforms, in transparent, black, or white. Finally, a stool with a punchline.

Designer: Dream Research Society

Scale a computer keycap up to stool size and most of the work is already done. The tapered skirt, the softly rounded corners, and the slightly lighter top cap with a bold white ESC legend all carry over straight from the keyboard. The corners of the skirt are cut away, which leaves four small feet and gives the stool its stance. No dimensions are listed, so I can’t give you a seat height, but the photos show a low, squat piece that looks built for tying shoelaces rather than hosting dinner. A keycap that helps you leave the house is a decent joke.

The whole top lifts off as a lid, with a small finger slot on one edge, and underneath is a hollow body. The promo renders fill it with toy bricks, picture books, and plush animals. In the transparent version you can see all of it through the walls, so the clutter becomes a display. The one compromise is obvious from the form: the lid is also the seat, so grabbing anything inside means standing up first. That works for shoes and gets a little annoying for toys, especially when the one brick you need is at the bottom. Call it a keyboard shortcut that takes two steps.

The listing shows three bodies, transparent, black, and white, each topped with a gray lid. Gray on white is the pairing that reads as a keyboard from across the room, like something pulled off a beige-era office desk. Separate renders also show frosted bodies with pink, green, and cream lids, though I can’t tell whether those are sold or just mood. The joke has real history behind it, too. Bob Bemer pushed the escape character into ASCII around 1960, and the key has been the computer world’s emergency exit ever since. Parking that exit button in your entryway, right where you leave the house, is a gag that took 60 years to set up.

The designer says it’s a real product, on sale through major Chinese e-commerce platforms. I couldn’t find a price, materials, weight limit, or brand name, and nothing points to a US release, so American readers get to admire from afar for now. The promo images also include arrow-key versions in clear blue, which I’d love to see as a four-stool cluster, though I can’t confirm they exist beyond the renders. If they do, someone’s living room is about to become a cursor cluster. Until then, the humble plastic stool finally has an inside joke, and all it took was a keyboard.

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