Tag Archives: Furniture

Haworth Just Gave Its Most-Loved Office Chair a Softer Side

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The original Hello lounge chair launched in 2002. Over two decades later, it’s back, and Patricia Urquiola has had her way with it. The result is the kind of redesign that makes you wonder why it took this long.

Haworth’s Hello collection has been a reliable fixture in offices, lobbies, and collaborative spaces for years. The bones were always good: solid frame construction, thoughtful ergonomics, and a form language that leaned into comfort without abandoning function. But the original aesthetic, however serviceable, was a product of its era. Urquiola looked at all of that and asked a different question. Not “how do we update this?” but “how do we make it feel like right now?”

Designer: Patricia Urquiola for Haworth

The answer, as it turns out, is softness. Not softness as a design cliché, but softness as a deliberate visual and tactile language. Urquiola kept the platform and the time-tested interior frame that gave the original its structural integrity, then completely transformed the exterior into something rounder, warmer, and far more contemporary. The lines are gentler. The proportions feel more considered. The overall effect is a chair that looks equally at home in a sleek corporate atrium and a boutique hotel lobby, which is not an easy balance to achieve.

One of the smartest things Urquiola did here was in how she handled the practical details. She didn’t just make it look better; she made it work better for the way people actually use shared spaces today. The casters are there for mobility, but they’re concealed beneath a skirt, so the chair reads as a lounge piece first and a mobile unit second. That’s a meaningful distinction. Nobody wants to feel like they’re sitting in something that belongs on a warehouse floor.

The collection extends beyond a single chair. Hello is a family: lounge chairs and poufs that can be configured in combinations suited to practically any setting. The pouf is particularly clever. It functions as a standalone ottoman, but a nylon pull strap makes it portable, and a back bolster can be added to transform it into low-profile mobile seating. That kind of adaptability is exactly what flexible, activity-based workplaces need right now, and the design handles it without looking like it’s trying too hard.

The optional accessories are worth noting too. A dual-pivot tablet arm, cupholder, and bag hook can all be specified, which brings Hello into territory that traditional lounge seating rarely occupies. It’s not quite a workstation, but it’s not purely decorative either. It sits, deliberately, somewhere in between, and that’s the whole point. The modern workplace doesn’t always separate focused work from casual gathering, and Hello doesn’t ask you to either.

Patricia Urquiola is one of those designers whose work you can recognize before you even see her name attached to it. Her pieces tend to have a quality that is both generous and precise, warm but never fussy, tactile without being ostentatious. Her portfolio, which spans collaborations with Cassina, Flos, Kartell, and many others, has long established her as someone who understands that great design is ultimately about how people feel inside it. The Hello redesign is completely consistent with that view. You can tell it was made by someone who actually thinks about what it means to sit down.

What Hello gets right, quietly and without fanfare, is the idea that the workplace deserves beautiful things. Not just functional things. Not just efficient things. Beautiful ones, with texture and softness and a visual warmth that makes people want to stay longer than they planned. That sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but it’s actually quite rare in contract furniture, where the priority is so often durability over delight and cost efficiency over craft.

Urquiola and Haworth have managed to give Hello both. It’s a piece that respects where it came from while having the confidence to become something entirely its own. After more than twenty years, the chair said hello again, and it meant it.

The post Haworth Just Gave Its Most-Loved Office Chair a Softer Side first appeared on Yanko Design.

Mo & A Turned a Mitsubishi Taillight Into a Night Stand

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Most furniture draws its inspiration from architecture, nature, or the clean geometric vocabulary of modernist design. Occasionally, a designer looks at the back of a van and decides that’s the most interesting starting point in the room. That’s exactly what happened at Mo & A, the Taipei and London-based studio, when they lifted the rectangular taillights off a Mitsubishi Delica and rebuilt them into a fully functioning night stand. The result is one of the more unexpected pieces of furniture you’ll come across this year.

The Mitsubishi Delica, for anyone who didn’t grow up around automotive culture, is a Japanese minivan with a cult following that extends far beyond car enthusiasts. It’s boxy, capable, and has the kind of clean, angular aesthetic that ages well. In Taiwan, where Mo & A is rooted, it’s been a fixture on the road for decades, which probably explains why the studio saw storytelling potential in those taillights rather than just, well, taillights.

Designer: Mo & A

Mo & A’s entire design philosophy orbits around that idea: reinterpreting existing hardware and translating it into everyday objects. The studio describes its work as blurring the line between outdoor materials and the domestic environment. It sounds like a design-school brief when you read it as a mission statement, but the Delica night stand is proof that the concept holds up past the theoretical. The studio has applied the same thinking to other pieces, including a taxi lamp and a bamboo floor lamp, but this one might be the most complete expression of it yet.

The piece itself is built around the Delica’s signature rectangular taillight housing, mounted on an angular metal stand. The construction leans into its automotive origins, featuring riveted joints and steel toggle switches that look and feel industrial in the best possible way. The lights come in four modes across amber, red, and white, and a light diffuser is available if you want to soften the glow depending on the mood you’re going for. At $267 and up, it sits in that considered-purchase territory: intentional without being extravagant.

The piece opens up a broader conversation worth having about what furniture is allowed to reference. Design has always borrowed from other disciplines, but there’s typically a sanitizing step in between, where the source material is abstracted just enough to feel polished and domestic. Mo & A skipped that step almost entirely. The taillight looks like a taillight. The toggle switches look like they belong on a piece of industrial equipment. That’s not a flaw in the design; it’s the whole point of it.

The Delica night stand also earns its nostalgia, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. So much of what passes for nostalgic design right now is surface-level: a retro color palette, a vintage-adjacent font, a vague reference to something mid-century. Mo & A’s approach is more direct than that. The physical object carries actual material history. The form has a reason for existing the way it does, and that translation from road to room feels deliberate rather than decorative. There’s a kind of honesty to it that a lot of trend-chasing furniture simply doesn’t have.

From a purely practical standpoint, it functions as a light source in four variations, which is more flexibility than most conventional bedside lamps offer. The amber setting alone would probably justify the purchase for anyone who has ever tried to wind down at night next to a lamp that comes in one setting, and that setting is aggressively bright.

Pieces like this are a useful reminder that the most interesting design problems aren’t always about inventing new forms. Sometimes the better question is what happens when you take something familiar out of its original context and relocate it somewhere it was never supposed to go. Mo & A asked that question about a Japanese van’s taillight, put it next to a bed, and the answer turned out to be more compelling than most purpose-built furniture ever manages to be.

The post Mo & A Turned a Mitsubishi Taillight Into a Night Stand first appeared on Yanko Design.

PEEL Turns Discarded Fruit Skins Into Living Textile

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There is something quietly radical about looking at a fruit peel and refusing to see waste. Salak and lychee skins are usually treated as the most disposable part of the fruit, peeled off, discarded, and forgotten almost instantly. PEEL begins at that exact moment of dismissal. Instead of blending the skins down, disguising them, or forcing them to behave like leather, the project lets them remain visibly themselves.

Developed by designer Anthony Guevara, PEEL transforms discarded salak and lychee skins into a durable, biodegradable textile made without adhesives, synthetic polymers, or toxic chemical treatments. The material offers a regenerative alternative to leather and petroleum-based vegan substitutes, with estimated CO₂ emissions up to 95% lower. What makes the work compelling is that it does not rely on the usual visual language of “sustainable design.” It is not trying to look clean, neutral, or overly polished. It carries the roughness, colour shifts, scale-like patterns, and irregular surfaces of the skins it comes from.

Designer: Nefeli Vitoraki

The project is deeply rooted in Indonesia, where salak and lychee are widely consumed, and their skins are discarded in large quantities every day. These fruits also have a short shelf life, which means their peels are consistently available through existing food systems. This matters because PEEL does not depend on growing a new crop or creating an additional supply chain for material production. It begins with what already exists, what is already abundant, and what is already being thrown away.

The process is careful rather than overly industrial. After the fruits are consumed, the skins are collected and dried through a controlled low-heat process. This step preserves the natural structure and pliability of each peel, which is essential for turning it into a textile. The skins are then treated with naturally derived materials to improve durability and water resistance. Once stable, they are stitched onto biodegradable backing structures such as cotton muslin or linen.

That stitching is important. Many plant-based leather alternatives are processed into uniform sheets, often requiring synthetic binders or coatings to hold everything together. In doing so, they erase the character of the original material. PEEL takes the opposite route. Each skin is treated and applied individually, so the final textile carries visible traces of the fruit’s form, colour, and texture. The result feels less like imitation leather and more like a material with its own identity.

From a design perspective, honesty is one of the strongest parts of the project. Sustainable materials often get pushed into proving themselves by looking like something familiar. Mushroom leather has to look like leather. Cactus leather has to look like leather. Grape waste, apple waste, pineapple fibre, all of them are frequently judged by how convincingly they can replace an existing material. PEEL resists that pressure. It does not apologize for the fact that it used to be fruit skin. It builds its visual and tactile language from that origin.

The development process also reveals the material’s stubbornness. PEEL began with salak alone, with no guarantee that the skins could become usable. Early experiments focused on drying methods because the peels were too brittle to stitch by machine. The first prototype, a stool, had to be hand-stitched throughout. More than fifty tests followed, adjusting combinations of naturally derived treatments until the material became flexible, durable, and workable. The second prototype, a bag, expanded the system to lychee and four other tropical fruit peels.

Home testing across abrasion, water, heat, humidity, and bend fatigue showed promising results across all six materials. Every peel demonstrated high heat and humidity resistance, and samples have remained stable for over a year. These early results suggest that the project is more than a beautiful material experiment. It has the potential to become a practical textile system, especially for applications where biodegradability, local sourcing, and distinctive surface quality are valuable.

The local production model makes the idea stronger. Since the skins can be sourced where the fruits are processed or consumed, PEEL imagines a closed regional loop: fruit is eaten, skins are collected, material is made, and products are produced within the same community. This keeps the material connected to the place. It also creates an opportunity for small local workshops in Indonesian fruit-growing regions, turning a low-value waste stream into a new economic resource.

The next step is bringing more rigour to the testing and supply chain. Guevara is working toward partnerships with Indonesian fruit processing factories where skins are currently discarded, creating a zero-cost raw material source. In parallel, collaboration with Imperial College London aims to formalise lab testing for tensile strength, abrasion resistance, and long-term durability.

PEEL is interesting because it does not frame sustainability as a finish, a label, or a moral claim attached to the end of a product. It begins with material behaviour. It asks what a peel can do before deciding what it should become. That shift feels important. The project is not just about replacing leather. It is about expanding the designer’s imagination around overlooked matter and treating waste as something with form, memory, and potential still left in it.

The post PEEL Turns Discarded Fruit Skins Into Living Textile first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Plywood Stool Has Cords That Hold Your Books, Magazines, and Stationery

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Every stool I’ve ever owned has ended up doing three jobs it was never designed for. Phone stand. Laundry rack. Temporary table for the cup of tea I told myself I’d finish before it went cold. Furniture absorbs the chaos of daily life whether designers plan for it or not, so the smarter move is to plan for it. Yamashiro did exactly that, and she did it in Okinawa, designing from a culture that has always understood objects as participants in daily life rather than background props.

The Strings Stool won an A’ Design Award in the Furniture Design category, and looking at it, you understand why immediately. Blue cords run in parallel grooves down the face of a molded plywood form, taut like the strings of a sanshin, Okinawa’s traditional three-stringed instrument. Slip a book between them. Slip a notebook. The stool holds them without complaint, the same way it holds you.

Designer: Yuna Yamashiro

The sanshin has been part of everyday Okinawan life for so long that it stopped being a cultural artifact and became furniture in its own right, something you pick up, put down, lean against a wall, live around. Yamashiro’s design carries that same quality of unassuming presence. The Strings Stool doesn’t announce itself as a design object. It sits in a room and waits to be useful, which is a harder thing to design than it sounds. The A’ Design Award jury clearly recognized that the stool operates on two registers simultaneously, as a cultural translation and as a genuinely functional piece of furniture, and rewarded it accordingly.

Yamashiro built a mold and applied pressure to bend multi-layered plywood into a continuous arc, a single curved form that flows from one leg face up and over the seat and back down the other side. Getting wood to adhere cleanly to a mold under pressure without losing its shape is genuinely difficult work, and the finished piece shows no evidence of that struggle. The layers visible at the edges give the form its graphic quality, a subtle striation that rhymes with the cord spacing running down the face. At 500mm wide, 300mm deep, and 450mm tall, it occupies a room without dominating it. The legs splay outward in a trapezoid stance, which does two things at once: it makes the seat more comfortable to straddle, and it lets the stools nest and stack cleanly, a practical consideration that most furniture designers treat as an afterthought but Yamashiro baked in from the start.

Most keen-eyed enthusiasts will remember a similar organizer format in Cocoon’s GRID-IT, elastic cords stretched across a rigid panel holding gear in place through tension alone. Yamashiro scales that mechanic up to furniture size, anchors the cords at the base with visible knotted eyelets, and makes them user-replaceable, so you can swap colors to match a room or replace worn cords without retiring the whole piece. That replaceability is the kind of decision that separates designers who think about ownership from designers who think about photography.

The one honest caveat is that those same cords, running across the seat surface, will make themselves known after a few minutes without a cushion. Yamashiro designed a central opening into the seat to improve comfort, and it helps, but anyone planning to use this as their primary work perch rather than an occasional seat should factor a thin cushion into the equation. That’s a small asterisk on an otherwise cohesive and quietly impressive debut.

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Kineo Might Be the Best-Looking Thing in Your Office

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The first thing you notice about Kineo is that it doesn’t look like fitness equipment. It doesn’t look like a medical device, a sensory deprivation pod, or a corporate novelty. Standing in an open-plan office, it looks like furniture: considered, warm, and completely at ease between a row of workstations and a glass conference wall. For a product designed to bring guided stretching and spinal decompression into the workplace, that’s not a small achievement. It’s actually the whole design challenge.

Designer Kat Lew built Kineo in collaboration with fitness brand Precor to address work-related musculoskeletal disorders, the chronic lower back, neck, and shoulder discomfort that most desk workers know well and most offices address badly. The booth measures 5 feet by 5 feet by 8 feet, built from modular panels so it can be shipped, carried through a standard service elevator, and assembled on-site. The logistics are solved. Now look at the thing itself.

Designer: Kat Lew

The exterior is a tall rectangular volume with deeply rounded corners, split between tinted glass and a cream acoustic panel, unified by a warm champagne gold frame. The glass is smoked just enough to imply privacy without making the booth feel opaque or isolating. The fabric panel has the soft, oatmeal texture you’d expect on a well-designed lounge chair, not a piece of fitness infrastructure. Together they give the booth a material warmth that sits comfortably alongside contemporary office furniture. It borrows loosely from the visual language of privacy pods, the kind you’d find in forward-thinking studios and airport lounges, but the palette keeps it from reading as purely functional. The gold trim does a lot of quiet persuasion here. It signals quality without announcing it.

Inside, the booth divides into two distinct zones, and this is where Lew’s design thinking becomes most legible. One side features a wall-mounted stretching apparatus: a set of slim horizontal bars at multiple heights, embedded into a warm wood-lined back wall. The bars accommodate hanging back decompression, shoulder and back stretches, calf raises, and thigh stretches, guided by a small control panel positioned at eye level. It’s a considered sequence. And importantly, the bars look like they belong on that wall. They don’t look bolted on; they read as part of the architecture, which takes real restraint to pull off.

The other half is a micro-workspace: a fold-down desk, an adjustable saddle-style stool with a round seat, and an arc floor lamp with a small copper shade. The lamp is doing significant tonal work here. A copper-shaded arc lamp in an office recovery booth communicates something specific: that this space is meant to feel restorative rather than clinical. Kineo has three functional modes inside the work zone: standing desk, sitting desk, and a meditation configuration where the desk folds away and the lamp becomes the only light source. The shift between those modes is a good editorial decision. The meditation mode is an acknowledgment that recovery isn’t always about movement. Sometimes it’s about stillness.

What holds the whole design together is the restraint of the material palette. Warm wood, oatmeal fabric, matte gold metal, and tinted glass are each quiet on their own, and Lew keeps them that way. Nothing fights for attention. The arc lamp echoes the curve of the door frame. The stretch bars mirror the warmth of the interior paneling. Every detail reads as intentional without being fussy, which is the hardest balance to strike in this kind of product.

That coherence matters more than it might seem. Kineo is asking people to do something that most office environments quietly discourage: slow down, step away, and attend to their body during the workday. A booth that looked harsh or clinical or gym-adjacent would undermine that ask before a person even stepped inside. The softness of the design is not decorative. It is, in fact, the argument. Walk past Kineo and it looks like a place you might actually want to go. That’s not accidental. That’s the design working exactly as it should.

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One Push Finally Fixes the WFH Desk Problem

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Most of us never really figured out how to leave work at home because, at some point, home became work. The pandemic turned dining tables into conference rooms and bedroom corners into permanent offices, and while the world has technically moved on, the desk hasn’t. It’s still there, covered in cables and sticky notes, glowing at you at 9 PM like a passive-aggressive coworker who never clocks out. For the millions of people still living and working in compact spaces, that boundary between “on” and “off” remains one of the most stubbornly unsolved problems in modern life. That’s the exact gap designer Seung Bin Bae is addressing with DuoShift, and the solution is refreshingly physical.

DuoShift is a dual-purpose display designed for small home offices. It has two modes, and switching between them requires exactly one motion: a single upward shift of the screen. In Work Mode, it sits at standard monitor height and does what a monitor does: it holds your spreadsheets, your browser tabs, your video calls. But when you physically push it upward, it enters Life Mode, transforming into a digital art frame while freeing the entire desk surface below it. That’s your signal. Work is done. The desk is yours again.

Designer: Seung Bin Bae

The elegance here is intentional and worth pausing on. We’ve spent years trying to solve work-life balance through apps, timers, calendar blocks, and browser plugins, basically asking software to impose discipline on behavior that software helped unravel in the first place. Bae flips that logic entirely. DuoShift solves a psychological problem through a physical act. It doesn’t ping you or send a notification. You have to physically move it, and that movement is the whole point.

There’s a behavioral psychology concept in here that designers don’t always get credit for tapping into. Rituals matter. The act of shutting down a laptop, hanging up a coat, or changing out of work clothes serves a real cognitive function: it tells your brain that a transition has happened. DuoShift is engineered to be exactly that kind of ritual, embedded directly into an object you already use every day. One push, and the desk stops being an office.

Visually, the design is minimal in a way that feels considered rather than cold. It’s slim, clean, and customizable, built to integrate with a living space rather than dominate it. In Life Mode, it becomes something closer to wall art than tech equipment. Bae’s design philosophy centers on creating practical, user-friendly products that solve real-world problems rather than merely chasing novelty, and DuoShift reflects that clearly. It doesn’t oversell itself. It doesn’t have seventeen features. It has one good idea, executed well.

The context matters too. Compact living isn’t a temporary trend or a demographic niche. Urban apartments are getting smaller, remote work remains widespread, and the people navigating both are still largely on their own when it comes to creating functional, psychologically healthy environments at home. Most monitor design has simply not caught up to this reality. DuoShift is one of the rare products that treats the WFH experience as a design problem worthy of a serious, considered design response.

Is it a complete answer to burnout? No, and it doesn’t claim to be. But it gets at something that most tech products completely sidestep: the importance of having a physical, tangible signal that your workday has ended. Not a notification. Not an alarm. A gesture. A real, physical thing you do with your hands that marks the shift from one mode to another.

The fact that this came from a student designer makes it more interesting, not less. It suggests that the next generation of product designers is less interested in adding features and more focused on subtracting friction from the parts of life that matter most. DuoShift is a small product with a genuinely large idea behind it, and that kind of thinking is exactly what the WFH era still needs.

The post One Push Finally Fixes the WFH Desk Problem first appeared on Yanko Design.

LiberNovo Prime Day: 43% Off the Chair That Stretches Your Spine

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The ergonomic chair market has grown into a fairly crowded space, with brands competing on lumbar support, adjustability ranges, and premium materials. For most people, the options are plentiful. What hasn’t changed much, though, is the underlying assumption that comfort is something you configure once and hold. Set the lumbar height, dial in the recline tension, and somehow maintain that position for the next eight hours.

LiberNovo builds its chairs around the belief that support should adapt to movement rather than resist it. The brand’s focus on long-term spinal health through dynamic ergonomics has earned recognition from prestigious publications and awards bodies. With the LiberNovo Prime Sale now underway, its lineup is available at some of the steepest discounts the brand has offered.

Designer: LiberNovo

Click Here to Buy Now. Hurry Prime Day Deals End Soon!

LiberNovo Omni Pro

The problem with static chairs becomes clearer when you look at how people actually sit. Research shows the average person shifts posture about 13 times per hour, totaling over 127 unconscious adjustments in a 9.8-hour workday. Conventional chairs treat every shift as a problem. The Omni treats them as input, with 60 precision joints and four synchronized mechanisms continuously responding to keep the back, neck, hips, and arms supported.

LiberNovo Maxis

The backrest is where this becomes most tangible. The Bionic FlexFit system uses eight flexible panels, 14 dual-link points, and 16 ball joints, letting the back support flex and contour rather than press back with a rigid frame. The ErgoPulse motor sculpts the lumbar curve to maintain spinal alignment as the user moves, so whether leaning back to think or shifting forward to focus, the support follows without manual input.

LiberNovo Omni

Two features push the Omni into less familiar ergonomic territory. OmniStretch is a five-minute motorized spinal decompression cycle built directly into the chair, guiding the backrest through a gentle stretch sequence to release tension and restore alignment mid-session. Active AirFlow Seat Ventilation draws cool air through a five-layer breathable seat structure using a quiet centrifugal fan, with built-in sensors that pause the airflow automatically whenever you leave the seat.

LiberNovo Omni SE

The standard Omni is the balanced choice, pairing electric lumbar control, OmniStretch, and the Dynamic Support System in one cohesive package. The Prime Sale includes flash deals on selected Omni bundles from June 18 to July 11, and the full campaign launches June 23. The US Premium Bundle, including the Omni chair, Footrest Stepsync, and battery, is priced at $829 against an MSRP of $1,449, a 43% discount. EU buyers get the steepest cut, with the bundle at €939 versus an MSRP of €1,826, a 49% savings.

Not everyone needs the full stack, though. The Omni SE is the most accessible, with manual lumbar support and the same core ergonomic architecture, but without OmniStretch or a built-in battery. The Omni Pro is the fully featured version, adding Active AirFlow Seat Ventilation, a high-grade aluminum alloy base, and Danish Gabriel Atlantic Fabric. The brand new Maxis Series rebuilds the platform for users between 5’10” and 6’7″. In the US, Super Early Bird pricing for these runs through July 31, with discounts of up to 44% off. The Omni SE starts from $569, with the Omni Pro starting at $909, and the Maxis from $809.

The sale adds a few extras worth noting. Qualifying purchases above regional thresholds are eligible for Lucky Spin Rewards, including a chance at a free chair or footrest. All purchases during the Prime Sale will earn triple rewards points for future orders. Additionally, Omni orders over $850 qualify for an exclusive complimentary gift bundle. It’s a straightforward set of incentives attached to a lineup that was already worth paying attention to before the discounts.

Click Here to Buy Now. Hurry Prime Day Deals End Soon!

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The Desk That Leans on Your Wall and Weighs Less Than Your Bag

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Most of us have made peace with the idea that a proper workspace takes up space. It claims a corner, demands a room, or at least stakes out a permanent spot in your home where it will sit indefinitely, collecting cables and coffee cups. The Leandesk, designed by Cornwall-based Henry Swanzy, politely disagrees.

The concept is elegantly counterintuitive: a sit-stand desk that doesn’t sit on the floor. Instead, it leans against a wall or window using nothing more than physics, weight distribution, and a pair of non-marking rubber pads to hold itself in place. No drilling. No brackets. No landlord negotiations. The harder you lean into it, the tighter its grip. It’s the kind of mechanic that makes you wonder why we’ve been bolting things to walls for centuries.

Designer: Henry Swanzy

Swanzy’s background is in cabinet-making, which might explain why the Leandesk feels so considered in its construction. The desk is built from FSC-certified bamboo and uses Dyneema cord, a material borrowed from performance marine sports, to achieve its exceptional strength-to-weight ratio. The whole thing weighs under 8kg, yet it’s independently load-tested to hold 65kg. You can raise or lower the working surface, or tilt it to any angle, by simply pulling a cord through hidden alloy cleats, a mechanism drawn from maritime rigging. No motors, no buttons, no app required.

That last point matters more than it might seem. The design world has a complicated relationship with simplicity right now. We keep layering technology onto things that didn’t need it, calling it innovation when it’s often just addition. Swanzy went the other direction entirely. His philosophy is to pare down to essential elements and be as efficient with materials as possible, and the Leandesk is the full expression of that thinking.

The sustainability piece is genuinely impressive, and not in a vague, aspirational way. Over 97% of Leandesk’s components are reusable or recyclable, and its carbon footprint has been independently assessed at as low as 10.7 kg CO₂e over five years. Manufacturing runs on solar power, and there’s a take-back programme at end of life. It’s the rare product where the environmental claims have actual numbers attached to them.

When the workday is done, the desk folds flat to just 50mm deep. It can slide behind a door, tuck under a sofa, or hang on its own dedicated wall hook. That last detail, the fact that storage was designed into the product rather than treated as an afterthought, says a lot about how Swanzy approached the whole project. This is a desk that was designed to disappear when you need it to, which makes it remarkably well-suited to how many of us actually live.

It’s worth pausing on that, because it runs against a trend. The dominant image of the home office is still something maximalist: a dedicated room, a substantial L-shaped desk, a monitor stand, a ring light. The pandemic made that aspiration common, and the furniture industry followed accordingly. But a lot of people are working out of apartments, spare bedrooms that double as guest rooms, and living spaces that were never meant to absorb an office. The Leandesk was conceived exactly for those realities.

The desk is available in two widths, Original at 860mm and Compact at 660mm, both under 8.5kg. It has picked up recognition from serious design critics, including a longlist from Dezeen Awards, which is not the kind of accolade handed out for novelty alone.

I’ll be honest: I don’t think every person needs a Leandesk. If you have a dedicated office and love your setup, this isn’t for you. But if you’ve ever stared at a bulky desk that eats your room and wondered whether furniture has to work this hard against you, the Leandesk is a genuinely interesting answer. It’s proof that the best design solution isn’t always more. Sometimes it’s just less, leaned against a wall, and ready to fold away before dinner.

The post The Desk That Leans on Your Wall and Weighs Less Than Your Bag first appeared on Yanko Design.

How Pasta Became Interior Design’s Most Playful Muse

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There is something wonderfully unserious, and yet oddly elegant, about pasta-inspired decor. What began as an April Fools’ joke by luxury stone and tile company Artistic Tile has now become part of a broader design movement that treats pasta as form, memory, geometry, and material inspiration.

In April, Artistic Tile posted its newest “product line” on Instagram: mosaics featuring macaroni and farfalle shapes arranged like pasta in sauce. The collection, cheekily called Al Dente, immediately caught attention. Followers loved the concept, with many joking that Italian restaurants should take the idea seriously. The only problem? It was posted on April 1. The tiles were never originally meant to be real. But the joke had too much flavor to stay fictional.

Designer: Studio Yellowdot

The idea first emerged while Artistic Tile’s president and chief product officer, Zach Epstein, was reviewing another design with a boomerang-like shape. The curve suggested something more familiar and playful: macaroni. After the enthusiastic online response, Artistic Tile decided to bring the concept to life through its Tailored To program, which allows for custom designs. What started with macaroni and farfalle expanded into vodka rigatoni made from limestone and Rosa Perlino, and butter noodles made with Limone Marmi marble. Beneath the humor, the pattern works because it is recognizable, abstract, and decorative without feeling too literal.

That balance between wit and refinement is exactly why pasta has become such an appealing muse for designers. Pasta is familiar, playful, sculptural, and deeply emotional. It carries family memories, comfort, culture, and craft, while offering an endless library of shapes: ridges, curls, tubes, shells, folds, ribbons, and spirals.

Pasta-inspired design does not need to belong only in Italian restaurants or food-focused spaces. Its value lies in its ability to spark conversation anywhere. A pasta-shaped pull on a cabinet, a lasagna-inspired chair, or a macaroni mosaic creates a moment of recognition. People pause, smile, and look closer. That small moment of surprise adds emotional value to an interior. It makes a space feel more human, less predictable, and more open to storytelling.

In an age where many interiors can feel overly polished or algorithmically similar, pasta brings a charming disruption. It introduces humor without making the space feel childish. It creates nostalgia without becoming overly sentimental. Because nearly everyone has some relationship with pasta, through family dinners, grocery aisles, childhood meals, or comfort food memories, the motif carries an easy emotional resonance. It becomes a shared reference point, allowing design to feel more approachable and social.

Canadian Italian artist and industrial designer Chris Fusaro’s work shows how pasta can operate as a design language. His bronze objects appear to be built from hyperrealistic pasta pieces, transforming bowls, strainers, trivets, lamps, pendants, and chairs into playful studies of repetition and form. In this context, pasta becomes a modular system. Its many shapes allow the idea to expand across different scales and objects without feeling immediately exhausted.

At Milan Design Week, pasta moved into an even larger spatial language through Edible Reveries, an exhibition by Artisia, a Barilla-owned company specializing in 3D-printed dry pasta, and Studio Yellowdot. Alongside tastings, visitors encountered pasta-inspired furniture, including a lounge seat, rocking chair, and ottoman shaped like enlarged dry noodles. The furniture was also 3D-printed, using a wood-composite material that echoed the process of shaping pasta dough. The result was surreal yet functional: soft and noodle-like in appearance, stable and architectural as furniture.

Other designers are exploring pasta at a more intimate scale. Australian hardware brand Lo & Co Interiors released its own Al Dente collection, featuring orecchiette-inspired knobs and lasagne-like pulls. These pieces bring a subtle wink to furniture and cabinetry. Their appeal lies in the way they feel familiar and sophisticated. A pasta-inspired drawer pull can be humorous, and when treated with the right material, finish, and proportion, it becomes unexpectedly elegant.

This trend feels timely because contemporary interiors are moving away from overly disciplined, sterile perfection and toward objects with personality, tactility, and a stronger sense of handcraft. Pasta forms naturally offer irregularity and charm. They feel shaped rather than engineered. They carry presence without becoming intimidating.

San Francisco designer Caleb Ferris found inspiration in pasta while observing the range of shapes found in grocery store aisles during the pandemic. The variety of pasta forms revealed itself as a kind of mass-produced design library. His lasagna chair, made in a ruffled black satin silhouette, brought tongue-in-cheek humor into furniture and went on to win the 2023 ICFF Editors Award for Seating. In a moment when people were craving lightness, pasta offered comedy, craft, and a break from overly serious design language.

New York interior designer Tara McCauley has leaned into the theatrical side of pasta. Her lamp, made with real linguine, faux parsley, and a clam shell base, plays with the line between decorative object and edible absurdity. The piece creates a moment of surprise: at first glance, it reads as a whimsical design object, but up close, the use of real pasta turns it into something stranger and more memorable.

Pasta-inspired design works because it is funny without feeling disposable. It adds value to interior spaces by being memorable. It gives people something to notice, talk about, and connect with. Whether placed in a home, boutique hotel, retail space, gallery, or restaurant, it can soften the atmosphere and make the environment feel more personal.

Pasta has always carried the logic of design. It is engineered to hold sauce, shaped for texture, scaled for the hand and mouth, and tied to ritual. Now, designers are moving it from the kitchen table into the wider world of interiors. The result is a little ridiculous, surprisingly refined, and very hard not to love.

The post How Pasta Became Interior Design’s Most Playful Muse first appeared on Yanko Design.

A Designer Just Turned His Memories Into Chairs You Can Sit In

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The chair is probably the most taken-for-granted object in any room. You pull one out, you sit, you get up and push it back in. That’s the full extent of the relationship most of us have with it, a transaction so unremarkable it barely registers. So when a designer decides to treat the chair as a kind of autobiography, carved out of wood and layered with personal memory, it forces you to rethink that entire casual dynamic in a way that feels both unexpected and long overdue.

Chilean designer Camilo Huinca, who works under the studio name ONLYJOKE, has built a collection of sculptural wooden chairs that are less about sitting and more about telling. Titled Personal Histories, the work transforms familiar furniture forms into autobiographical portraits. Faces emerge from backrests. Figures are carved directly into seats and tabletops. Painted motifs trace emotional landscapes into the grain of the wood itself. These aren’t decorative touches you might overlook at first glance and appreciate later. They’re the whole point, present and insistent from the moment the piece comes into view.

Designer: Camilo Huinca

What Huinca is doing feels significant because furniture has long occupied this uncomfortable middle ground between design and art, never quite allowed to be taken seriously as either. Functional objects are expected to serve a purpose without demanding interpretation. Huinca rejects that, quietly but firmly. Each chair in Personal Histories carries a title with real weight: Rider on a Broken Horse, Partes Rotas (Broken Parts), Confluencia. These aren’t whimsical names assigned after the fact. They’re structural to the work itself, the same way a painting’s title can shift how you experience everything inside the frame. You come to each piece already oriented.

The material choice matters here, too. Wood carries time in a way that metal or plastic simply doesn’t. You can feel the decisions made in it, the places where the carver lingered and the places where they moved fast. Huinca draws on memories of summers spent in rural Chillán, Chile, and that rootedness in a specific place and biography gives the pieces an authenticity that’s hard to manufacture. The apple-shaped sculpture sitting atop one of his benches, the carved motifs, the exposed hardware, the layered paint: none of it reads as arbitrary. It reads as accumulated, like a life condensed into joints and grain and surface.

The chairs are also built through a modular system that allows them to be assembled and disassembled, which becomes more interesting when you consider how memory itself works. Nothing is permanently fixed. What you carry from your past doesn’t stay the same shape forever, and the fact that this furniture can be taken apart and reassembled feels less like a practical design consideration and more like a philosophical statement embedded quietly into the construction.

The inevitable question is about function. Can you actually sit in them? I’d like to think so, because the idea of using a piece of furniture that was carved from someone else’s grief or joy or the heat of a rural Chilean summer introduces an intimacy that most objects never manage to create. You wouldn’t just be in a room with the work. You’d be in direct contact with it, which is a different thing entirely.

The debate over whether furniture belongs in the gallery or in the home has been going on for decades. Designers like Ron Arad, Studio Job, and Nacho Carbonell have all pushed at that boundary in their own ways. But Huinca’s contribution feels distinct because the storytelling is so specific and so grounded in personal biography rather than formal experimentation. This isn’t furniture that gestures broadly toward concept. It’s furniture that insists on autobiography, that makes the personal structural and the structural unmistakably personal.

You walk away from Personal Histories with the nagging sense that every chair you’ve ever owned has been holding out on you. That the objects we press our bodies against daily could have been carrying so much more all along, and we simply never thought to ask.

The post A Designer Just Turned His Memories Into Chairs You Can Sit In first appeared on Yanko Design.