Tag Archives: coffee tables

LUMVIA Coffee Table Prototype Pairs a Customizable Mosaic With Hidden Drawers

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Choosing a coffee table usually means choosing a finish you’ll be living with for years. LUMVIA leaves that decision open a little longer, with interchangeable mosaic tiles that let you change the tabletop’s pattern instead of replacing the furniture. Developed by Romania’s mkt, the coffee table prototype puts that freedom inside a solid oak frame, with hidden storage underneath for the less decorative things.

The top has a hexagonal outline, with a broad wooden border surrounding 24 triangular tiles. Those repeated shapes give every arrangement a common structure, even when the colors change completely. You could group similar shades together or scatter contrasting pieces across the surface, turning the same geometry into a quiet backdrop or something that competes with the coffee cups for your attention.

Designer: mkt

There’s more to the customization than picking a favorite color, of course. Ceramic and glass provide different material options, while the lines between the tiles can be black or white. Dark separators make the individual triangles more pronounced against pale pieces; lighter ones soften that contrast. Even before rearranging anything, changing those lines alters how strongly the mosaic announces itself in a room.

That flexibility becomes particularly appealing when the rest of the room changes. A new rug might make yesterday’s tabletop feel a little too busy, while a neutral sofa could leave space for a bolder composition. LUMVIA’s removable tiles are intended to accommodate those shifts, letting owners revise the pattern over time rather than treating the original selection as a permanent decorating commitment.

The geometry continues underneath, where triangular drawers offer somewhere to tuck away the small objects that tend to collect around a sofa. Their shape follows the mosaic above, rather than introducing a rectangular box below it. There’s a practical tradeoff here, though: an angular compartment won’t suit everything, even if it gives keys or other small belongings a place away from the tabletop.

Both the drawers and the grid supporting the tiles are 3D-printed, placing digital manufacturing beneath the more familiar wood, ceramic, and glass. The approach gives the repeated triangular forms a role in construction as well as decoration. A separate wood version uses interlocking wooden tiles, offering another way to build a pattern without introducing ceramic or glass into the surface.

Still, a surface that invites rearranging also needs to work when you’re setting down a hot drink. Some tiles have recessed triangular details, while others are plain, making the choice about texture as well as color. How those pieces sit together, stay in place, and handle everyday spills will matter just as much as the pleasure of choosing which triangle goes where next.

LUMVIA remains a customizable prototype rather than a mass-produced table, and its configurator includes a step for selecting extra tiles. Having spare pieces could let you test different combinations without replacing the whole set every time your tastes change. You’ll still need somewhere to keep all the triangles that aren’t on display, though. Even a coffee table makeover can leave you with leftovers.

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Colheita Coffee Table Concept Shapes Its Steel Legs With Ant-Inspired Cuts

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Ants aren’t usually welcome around a coffee table, especially when there are snacks involved. The Colheita Coffee Table concept, however, borrows something more useful from them: the curved cuts left by leafcutter ants. Its steel surface folds downward to become its own legs, while movable wooden supports provide places for drinks. The nature reference gives the table its construction logic, rather than simply decorating it.

The body starts with a single steel sheet, cut by laser and bent so three broad sections reach the floor. Those sections remain attached, leaving openings where a conventional tabletop would be solid. Rather than adding separate legs underneath, Colheita carries the tabletop material through to its base. The relationship is easy to follow, even if the resulting silhouette is rather unusual.

Designer: Fabrício Auler

That approach is intended to reduce component count and material waste, although it isn’t a claim of waste-free manufacturing. A smaller detail helps explain how the sheet takes shape: enlarged, rounded ends on the cuts provide relief during bending. They’re there to ease stress where flat metal becomes a leg. The graceful curves have a fabrication purpose alongside their resemblance to a harvested leaf.

The wooden pieces might look like little bowls at first, but their flat tops serve as platforms rather than containers. Each hemisphere has a groove that slots onto the folded steel, allowing it to move along the edge. The wood adds a warmer color and visible grain to the dark metal, while giving a glass or small object its own resting place.

That means the arrangement doesn’t have to stay the same after you’ve chosen where the table goes. Move a wooden support closer to your seat, or spread them around when friends gather on different sides. The system is also intended to help stabilize the upper surface. These small additions therefore have a job beyond making the steel look a little less austere.

Of course, all those openings leave less uninterrupted space for whatever usually accumulates on a coffee table. A book or tray needs a solid patch beneath it, and a loose remote won’t forgive careless placement. The gaps do leave room for trailing plants and allow light through. Colheita invites you to arrange its contents more deliberately, which won’t appeal to everyone’s housekeeping habits.

The project also explores an unfinished carbon steel version, letting oxidation change the surface’s colors and patterns over time. That’s a different proposition from furniture meant to keep an immaculate, uniform finish. It gives the table a changing appearance rather than a permanent shade of gray. The project presentation doesn’t explain how to manage that aging around spilled drinks or routine household cleaning.

Colheita means “harvest” in Portuguese, a nod to the ants and to gathering around the table. It remains a concept project with fabrication work documented, rather than a verified retail offering. Dimensions and load capacity aren’t provided. Before trusting one of those platforms with hot coffee, you’d want to know how securely it stays put when someone nudges the table.

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Klara Is the Coffee Table That Lets You Fake a Tidy Room

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Coffee tables are places where people as well as things meet, and they can get messy really fast. Books, remote controls, accessories, knick-knacks, you name it, you can find it on top of these large surfaces. Klara doesn’t magically make your coffee table neater but instead embraces the chaos and gives that mess a place to hide, with a movable tray that covers part of the tabletop without turning it into some gigantic storage box.

Some coffee tables do have storage spaces beneath the tabletop, but that invites the other problem of not knowing where things are. Klara keeps all those items on top, ready when you do need them. Slide the raised tray over a part of the recessed surface, and you temporarily hide the unsightly mess. They’re still there, just out of sight and out of mind.

Designer: Joao Teixeira (Teixeira Design Studio)

Of course, the sliding tray itself becomes yet another surface you put something on, like a drink or maybe a piece of decor. The open area it leaves uncovered provides easy access to those you do need to reach. Move the tray over, and it’s gone. It’s almost like sweeping things under the rug.

Klara’s shape gives it both functionality and presence. Long, squared-off legs make it look like a small bench, and the ends of the frame angle outward to break away from the identity of a plain rectangle. The surfaces are colored precisely within those shapes, making it feel like a truly assembled piece of furniture rather than a box that simply has legs.

Color combinations include a warm yellow recess with the sliding tray in a matching earthy brown, all on top of a pale wood-grain frame. Another option goes a bit darker, with deeper wood tones and blue-gray surfaces. Both color options deliver the same effect: the tray visually stands apart, hinting at its movable nature, and when the table’s all clean, it offers a bit of contrast to keep things interesting.

That said, the “holding area” is finite, and you’ll definitely be limited in what you can place there. As for the moving tray, it’s best to actually remove what’s on top before sliding it over to another area, lest you want to deal with spilled drinks or shattered vases. Small things, but effective reminders that the table isn’t a solution to that mess.

The point isn’t to forget you have to tidy up. It’s to save you the stress of doing so when someone stops by unannounced. It gives you a little peace of mind, albeit briefly, but it also doesn’t encourage leaving things cluttered for long. After all, it doesn’t have a permanent place to hide things, so you’ll have to face the music sooner or later.

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Eran’s Steel Furniture Displays Books Like Artifacts Worth Keeping

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Books tend to get stacked, shelved, and forgotten in most homes. They migrate from nightstand to floor to the corner of a couch, and the one you’re currently reading usually ends up spine-down on whatever surface is closest when you need both hands. Furniture design has solved almost every other interaction you have with objects in a room, but the relationship between people and the books they’re reading hasn’t received much considered attention.

The Totem collection from Eran approaches that problem seriously. It’s a series of stainless steel furniture pieces that hold books as a primary function, not a secondary feature. Each piece has a precisely cut slot integrated into the steel that keeps a book in place, whether closed or open, at a specific height and angle. The slot isn’t decorative. It’s the whole point.

Designer: Fernanda Díaz Tijerina

The collection includes two standing totems and a coffee table, all in brushed stainless steel with a matte finish. One totem is a tall rectangular column with a V-shaped notch cut into the flat top, wide enough to hold an open book by its spine with pages splayed upward like wings above the steel. The other has an angled face cut diagonally from the top, with a slot along that edge that tilts the book upward at a display angle.

That’s a meaningful distinction from a bookend or a reading stand. The totems are floor-standing, placing a held book at roughly chest height, which makes picking it up feel more like choosing something from a collection than retrieving it from a pile. The sculptural quality holds whether a book is in the slot or not, but the slot gives each totem a reason to exist beyond decoration, and beyond what most furniture does with books at all.

The coffee table operates on the same logic at a different scale. A diagonal slot runs across part of the steel surface, holding an open book at a shallow, readable angle while the flat area remains free for other objects. It’s a small structural decision that changes how you interact with the table. A book placed in the slot reads as intentionally parked rather than absentmindedly abandoned, which turns out to be a more significant distinction than it sounds.

Eran’s studio philosophy fuses artisanal work with a vision that connects the past and present, and the Totem name draws on archaeological totemic sculptures found across Mexico. That framing does real work here. A totem holds something up, marks it as significant. Dedicating a piece of furniture specifically to keeping a book accessible and presented changes what the book means in a space, and the collection is made in Mexico, entirely in stainless steel, sitting at the intersection of furniture and sculpture with enough conviction that neither category alone quite covers it.

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NjommNjomm Is Exactly What It Sounds Like (It Eats Books)

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Say the name out loud. NjommNjomm. Go ahead. It sounds exactly like what you think it sounds like. Nom nom. Like something chewing. Like something very happily eating. And once you see what this coffee table concept actually does, you’ll understand that the name is entirely intentional and absolutely perfect.

Stuttgart-based designer Deniz Aktay, who goes by dezinobjects online, studied architecture and urban planning at the University of Stuttgart before turning his focus to furniture and object design. He has built a quiet but devoted following with pieces that feel more like riddles than furniture. His previous work includes tables named “Bookpet” and “Nessie,” and an award-winning piece called “Overlap.” The man clearly has a sense of humor, and with NjommNjomm, he’s leaning all the way into it.

Designer: Deniz Aktay (dezinobjects)

The concept is deceptively simple. NjommNjomm is a cuboid coffee table made from sustainable plastics. It has a clean, minimal silhouette, and nothing about it screams “look at me” from across the room. But tucked inside is a bevelled storage compartment, and when you slide a book of just the right size into it, something kind of surreal happens. The book appears to disappear into the table. The table appears to have swallowed it. Nom nom, indeed.

It’s the kind of visual trick that makes you do a double-take, and then immediately want to show everyone who walks into your living room. That impulse is actually one of the more underrated qualities a piece of furniture can have. Most objects just sit there. NjommNjomm performs.

The optical illusion comes from the bevelled cut of the internal compartment, which creates a striking contrast against the clean outer form. The book doesn’t just sit inside the table. It looks consumed, tucked away by the table itself. There’s a small theatrical quality to it that elevates it well beyond a storage solution and into something closer to a stage prop, except it lives in your living room and holds your coffee.

I’ll admit, my very practical brain did pause for a moment to wonder about the mechanics of it all. How exactly do you get the book in? Do you slide it through the opening? Is there a specific angle? And when you want to actually read it, does retrieving it break the illusion entirely? I genuinely don’t know, and I find myself hoping the answer is something elegantly simple, because the last thing this design needs is a frustrating extraction process every time you want to pick up where you left off.

Beyond the trick, the design is genuinely practical in other ways. The cuboid shape means it can be positioned horizontally as a traditional coffee table or flipped vertically to change its function entirely, making it more adaptable than most single-use furniture. For smaller spaces especially, that kind of flexibility matters. Being made from sustainable plastics also puts it in line with where furniture design is heading broadly, with more and more designers prioritizing materials that don’t cost the planet what they cost the consumer.

Aktay’s body of work says a lot about what he values as a designer. His pieces consistently sit at the intersection of wit and function, which is a harder balance to achieve than it looks. It’s easy to make something clever. It’s harder to make something clever that also works as real furniture in a real home. NjommNjomm feels like it manages both.

What makes the concept particularly compelling right now is the timing. The conversation around coffee tables in 2026 has largely been about sculptural forms and pieces that feel more like objects of art than pieces of furniture. NjommNjomm fits into that moment without trying too hard to belong to it. It’s minimal, almost to the point of invisibility, and then it does its little trick, and you realize it was never trying to be quiet at all.

For those of us who stack books on every available surface, there’s something poetic about a table that embraces the book as part of its identity rather than treating it as clutter. NjommNjomm doesn’t just hide the book. It celebrates it by making it look like the table chose to eat it.

It’s currently a concept, and Aktay shares his work on Instagram where designs like this tend to get picked up quickly by communities who recognize a good idea when they see one. Whether it eventually moves into production or stays in concept territory, it’s already done what great design is supposed to do. It made me stop scrolling. It made me think. And it made me want one.

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Elanco Made Dog-Shaped Furniture Because Your Sofa Has a Flea Problem

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Pet ownership and interior design have always had an uneasy relationship. You pick out a sofa carefully, and within months, it’s covered in fur, scratch marks, or the lingering evidence of a bad flea season. Design spaces rarely acknowledge the animal that shares the room, and pet health brands rarely think to communicate through furniture. Most of the time, these two worlds simply don’t talk to each other.

Elanco, a global animal health company, had other ideas. For the 2026 Fuorisalone, it partnered with Milan-based architecture and design studio Parasite 2.0 to bring the Pet Collection to BASE Milano. The result is a limited-edition series of four pet-inspired furniture pieces that are equal parts campaign, design statement, and visual joke, all presented at one of Milan’s most forward-thinking creative venues.

Designers: Elanco, Parasite 2.0

The whole thing starts from a simple but uncomfortable truth. Fleas don’t just live on pets; they infest homes too, spreading through the furniture and floors that pets and people share. Elanco’s point is that your sofa and your dog aren’t as different as you think, at least not from a flea’s perspective. The collection makes that idea impossible to ignore.

Each piece is a pun on both a breed and a furniture type. The Basset Longue is a chaise longue upholstered in wavy, brown-striped faux fur, shaped after a Basset Hound, and mounted on chrome legs with a tail detail at one end. The Dalmatian is a wide sofa in black-spotted white plush with dark, rounded backrests that look like a dog curled up in place.

The Yorkchair is a chunky armchair draped entirely in long, golden faux fur with a small chrome detail on the back, very much like a Yorkshire Terrier wearing a collar. Then there’s the Gattond, which departs from the canine theme and becomes a feline-inspired coffee table, its polished metal top sitting on a rounded, fuzzy golden base with a tail sticking out from the side.

The Pet Collection is on view at BASE Milano as part of the 2026 Fuorisalone, and it’s the kind of exhibit that sticks with you long after you’ve left the room. Not because the furniture is particularly comfortable, mind you, but because the message is hard to unsee once you’ve seen it. Your sofa and your dog are, apparently, not so different after all.

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Geometric coffee tables use 3D printing robots and recycled plastic to create organic forms

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3D printing has come a long way, but unless you’re using industrial printers in large factories, you’re probably limited to creating small designs or just parts of a whole. That, unfortunately, means that creators and makers aren’t able to fully express their ideas and designs, at least not those that involve pieces that can’t fit inside a commercial 3D printer. That said, you don’t have to give up your creative freedom to use an expensive production line if you can put 3D printing robots to smart use, like this sustainable plastic coffee table that is able to form organic geometric forms just by making the robot arm loop round and round.

Designer: Martin Zampach

When people think of 3D printers, they most likely think of those boxy contraptions sitting on tables, with nozzles that quickly run back and forth while oozing out hot plastic material in order to build up a three-dimensional object almost like from thin air. While this is the most common and most convenient kind of 3D printing, it has severe limitations in the size or shape of the object being made, basically anything that can fit the area and height of the printer.

LOOPS is a collection of coffee tables conceived to push the envelope of 3D printing and create objects that are larger than normal without requiring additional hardware. An industrial 3D printing robot pretty much goes round and round to create the base shape, building layer after layer of composite material until the desired form is achieved. This is the process used for creating the base of these tables, allowing the designer to apply different geometric shapes with organic forms that look like they’re literally growing before your very eyes.

The coffee tables are more than just experiments in 3D printing, they are also testaments to beautiful sustainable design. Tabletops are made from 100% recycled plastic that is crushed, melted, and then moulded from used plastic. The 3D printed bases, on the other hand, are made from composite material containing cellulose from responsible forestry. When the tables reach the end of their use, both the base and the top can be recycled or reused to extend their life in a different way.

The LOOPS coffee table collection offers a unique and novel design that pushes the boundaries of 3D printing to produce beautiful shapes and textures that almost resemble traditional ceramic creations. The variety of recycled plastics used gives each tabletop a unique appearance, both in color as well as in texture. The minimalist yet elegant designs make the coffee tables the perfect artistic centerpieces for any space, offering a thought-provoking design that opens your mind to the possibilities of sustainable 3D printing.

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