Tag Archives: Furniture

This PlayStation Controller Sofa Was Built for Co-Op Gaming Marathons

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Sofas and game controllers are a match made in heaven. Nothing quite screams ‘relaxing gaming sesh’ like a vacant controller lying on an empty sofa, waiting to be picked up, only to be put down hours later. Meanwhile, you start a gaming session on your sofa seated, inching lower and lower till you’re practically laying down in a position only your spine understands (and contends with). Sofas and game controllers truly are an iconic duo… and Muddycap mashed them into the most brilliant piece of furniture any gaming den could ask for.

Meet the Controller Sofa, the name is self-explanatory, as are the visuals. Inspired by the DualShock controllers from yesteryears, Muddycap decided to make the most ultimate gaming furniture ever. It seats two, perfect for mano-a-mano or co-op gaming, and absolutely looks the part. The sofa features a massive D-pad on the left, action buttons on the right, joysticks at the bottom, while the grips double as legs. The entire thing in black, because you can’t wipe dorito-dust or wear week-old hoodies on white furniture.

Designer: Muddycap

Muddycap’s mind is a truly wonderful place, looking at any object and saying ‘will it sofa?’ Past attempts have included traffic lights, martini glasses, even a battery icon. Those are just on our blog – their IG page has even more attempts (1,117 to be precise). All of them have a signature visual template – a sofa against a fairly plain background, allowing the sofa’s design to do all the talking.

This one feels like it speaks to a very specific crowd, and my only real gripe with it is that it isn’t a real sofa – just a 3D model for now. That being said, Muddycap’s represented the controller with stunning detail. Apart from being slightly more horizontally elongated compared to other controllers (but that’s only to accommodate 2 people comfortably), every other detail is spot-on. Including even the trigger buttons at the back, which could be storage compartments if you ask me. Nothing elevates a game-controller-inspired sofa more than an ice box packed into its design, for a few cold sodas or brewskis while gaming!

The post This PlayStation Controller Sofa Was Built for Co-Op Gaming Marathons first appeared on Yanko Design.

Ergonomic chairs rarely account for taller, broader users. LiberNovo built one, and it’s on discount for a week

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Ergonomic chairs may finally be having their XL moment. For years, the category has obsessed over lumbar dials, mesh backs, and posture-perfect adjustability, while a basic fit issue kept slipping through the cracks. Taller and broader users still end up with headrests that fall short, seats that cut off thigh support, and backrests that narrow right where fuller shoulders and wider frames need them most. Fashion learned long ago that fit changes everything. Office seating has taken its time getting there.

LiberNovo’s Maxis brings that shift into focus with proportions aimed at bigger frames, including an ultra-deep seat, a broader backrest, a longer-range headrest, and a controlled recline system built for steadier support. With the first-launch offer now in its final 7 days, the Maxis arrives at exactly the moment when ergonomic design feels ready to stop treating larger bodies like an afterthought.

Designer: LiberNovo

Click Here to Buy Now: $809 $1299 ($490 off). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

LiberNovo’s thinking with the Maxis starts with a premise that should have been more common in this category much earlier: bigger bodies carry different ergonomic demands, and scaling up a standard chair does not address them. The seat runs 52cm deep, enough to deliver full thigh support and put an end to the floating-leg issue that taller users deal with on most office chairs. The back frame spans 430mm at the shoulder and 520mm at the waist, covering the kind of broader build that standard backrests tend to taper away from at precisely the wrong moment. The chair targets users between 5’10” and 6’7″ and up to 399 lbs, a range that has historically been left to sort through limited options in a category that treats average proportions as a universal fit.

A U-shaped headrest with 140mm of vertical travel and 120mm of horizontal adjustment tackles one of the more persistent frustrations for taller sitters: the headrest that lands somewhere around the neck rather than behind it. The adjustment range gives users with longer torsos the clearance to place support where it actually belongs. The Arc Armrests follow a curved path outward, keeping broader frames from feeling squeezed in and addressing the kind of side compression that builds quietly across a long session without ever quite announcing itself as the source of discomfort.

Six springs run through the recline mechanism, producing a progressive lean-back that holds its composure under bigger bodies. The gap between this and the standard recline on most office chairs is felt rather than measured. Under heavier loads, an underdeveloped recline either locks up too rigidly or releases too suddenly. The Maxis builds a more graduated response into the system, so the lean-back feels deliberate and controlled through the full range of motion.

Choosing between the Manual, Electric, and Airflow is the first real decision for anyone looking at the Maxis, and the differences between them are substantial enough to take seriously. The Manual keeps things mechanical and intentional, using a physical dial for lumbar adjustment. It suits users who prefer a set-and-go approach and have no interest in adding electronics to their seating. The Electric introduces motorized lumbar control alongside OmniStretch, a spinal decompression cycle built into the chair that guides the lumbar support through a stretch-and-release sequence designed to reduce the compression that accumulates during extended sitting. That is a genuinely useful feature for anyone logging serious desk hours. The Airflow takes everything the Electric offers and adds active seat ventilation through a centrifugal fan embedded in the cushion, managing heat and moisture for users who run warm or regularly sit through long, uninterrupted sessions.

The Maxis does the heavy lifting for bigger builds, but LiberNovo is rounding out the same launch window with two additions aimed at standard-size users who want something more specific from their seating. The Omni Pro brings motorized lumbar support, OmniStretch, and active seat ventilation to the existing Omni platform, making it the performance-oriented pick for users who want the full feature set without the larger Maxis frame. The Omni SE takes the opposite approach, pairing the same ergonomic architecture with a manual lumbar mechanism for a cleaner, simpler setup that rewards users who prefer comfort without a control panel. Both carry LiberNovo’s same core philosophy of support that responds to movement, just packaged around different priorities and price points.

Seven days is not much runway, so if you have made it this far, it is worth heading over to LiberNovo’s storefront. Each Maxis version comes with bundle options, including StepSync Footrest bundles, while the Electric and Airflow models also offer premium bundles with an extra battery. The current pricing brings the Maxis Manual down to $809 from $1,299, the Maxis Electric down to $1,049 from $1,799, and the Maxis Airflow down to $1,239 from $1,859. The Omni Pro and Omni SE are also discounted as part of the same first-launch window, starting at $909 and $569, respectively. The first-release offer closes on July 31st across the board, which makes this week the last real opportunity to get into any of these chairs at launch pricing.

Click Here to Buy Now: $809 $1299 ($490 off). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

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Japanese Designer Built Furniture With No Glue or Screws

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Most furniture is held together by things you can’t see. Mortise-and-tenon joints, steel brackets, wood glue applied in generous amounts before being clamped overnight. The craft of traditional joinery is genuinely impressive, and furniture historians will rightly tell you it’s one of the oldest engineering feats in human history. But a Japanese designer named Tact Inoue just asked a simple question: what if you didn’t need any of that?

His answer is Mocky, a furniture series that throws out conventional joinery entirely and replaces it with heat, pressure, and the natural behavior of a material most people walk past every day without a second thought.

Designer: Tact Inoue

The material in question is artificial wood, specifically the kind composed of wood flour and resin, commonly used in outdoor decking. It’s not a glamorous material by any stretch. You’ve probably seen it on a boardwalk, a backyard patio, or a poolside deck. It blends in, does its job, and gets credited with being “low maintenance.” Tact Inoue looked at that material and saw something different entirely.

Because of its resin content, artificial wood can be heated until it softens. Inoue takes that softened state and presses the components together using a 20-tonne press machine. The heated surfaces fuse, adhering to each other as they cool. There are no fasteners, no glue, no mortise-and-tenon joints. The connection is the material itself. What comes out the other side looks nothing like what you’d expect from anything made of wood: warped surfaces, irregular joints, organic protrusions where two pieces met and merged under pressure.

And the thing is, it looks extraordinary. The imperfections are the point. Inoue isn’t treating the irregularities as flaws to be corrected before the piece ships. The warping and distortion that happen during the heat-pressing process are built into the design language of Mocky from the start. Irregularity is an active part of the making, not an accident of it. Each joint emerges from the behavior of the softened material rather than from a pre-drawn spec sheet. That’s a genuinely different relationship between designer and material, one where control is shared rather than total.

One of the standout pieces in the series is a bench that requires no aprons or stretchers to hold it together. The seat is made of two completely independent components that bond entirely through the fused connection. From a structural standpoint, that’s remarkable. From a visual one, it’s striking in the best way: a piece that looks grown rather than built.

That distinction matters. So much furniture design right now falls into one of two camps: aggressively minimal, where the process is hidden and the object looks like it appeared fully formed, or intentionally handmade, where visible effort is treated as the point. Mocky doesn’t fully belong to either. The process is visible, but it isn’t precious. The irregularity is intentional, but it isn’t decorative for its own sake. It reads as material honesty, which is a rarer quality in furniture than we might assume.

Inoue is also making a quieter argument about what artificial wood is for. It has spent its entire commercial life as a substitute, a stand-in for timber that doesn’t want to rot on your deck. Mocky pushes back on that framing. When you stop treating artificial wood as a replacement for something better and start treating it as a material with its own specific properties, it turns out it can do things natural wood never could. You cannot melt a solid oak leg into a joint. You cannot fuse cherry wood planks into each other using pressure alone.

That shift in perspective, from material-as-substitute to material-on-its-own-terms, is what makes Mocky feel genuinely interesting rather than just visually surprising. It’s a reminder that designers often do their best work not when they reach for the expected material, but when they ask what a rejected or overlooked one is actually capable of. The answer, in this case, is quite a lot.

The post Japanese Designer Built Furniture With No Glue or Screws first appeared on Yanko Design.

Half Pixel, Half Mirror: The Ghost Collection That Blurs Both Worlds

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If you’ve ever looked at an old video game screenshot next to a 4K render and felt strangely moved by both, Alberto Essesi’s Ghost Collection might be the furniture version of that feeling. It’s a collection that sits right at the edge of two visual languages, digital and analog, raw and refined, and somehow makes that tension feel completely intentional.

Essesi, a designer whose portfolio spans robotics, vehicles, and collectible objects, built the Ghost Collection around a single, surprisingly poetic idea: the contrast between high resolution and low resolution. The pieces merge smooth, mirror-polished aluminum with solid walnut wood crafted into staggered, blocky forms that look unmistakably pixelated. Not as a gimmick. Not as nostalgia. But as a genuine material conversation about how two entirely different visual languages can share the same physical object.

Designer: Alberto Essesi

Looking at the console table, the aluminum top is sleek and almost liquid in its finish, all rounded edges and reflective calm. Then it simply dissolves downward into what looks like a freeze-frame of a video game rendering, where geometry hasn’t fully loaded yet. The legs don’t look broken. They look deliberate. Like the pixel isn’t an error in the process but the process itself.

The same logic runs through every piece: the low-slung ottoman with its chrome top sitting above a pixelated walnut base, the wall bar with a single cluster of wood blocks anchoring an otherwise minimal steel rod, and the small sculptural objects that look, at certain angles, like characters from an early Minecraft world given physical weight and material warmth. That last detail is where the collection takes an unexpected turn into genuinely playful territory. The figurines don’t feel decorative in the traditional sense. They feel like they belong to a mythology the designer invented for this collection, artifacts from a world caught mid-render.

I’ll admit, my first instinct when I saw these pieces was to file them under “concept furniture,” the kind that photographs beautifully but lives permanently in a gallery or a mood board. The closer I looked, the less sure I was about that assessment. The craftsmanship is real. The walnut is solid and hand-detailed, each wooden block precisely cut and stacked into forms that read as chaotic but are actually quite controlled. The aluminum isn’t cold or clinical. It has a warmth to it in the way it curves, more like a well-worn chrome object than a surgical instrument.

The installation photography helps tell the story in two directions. Shot in a white gallery space, the pieces feel architectural, calm, almost meditative. Shot against dark, raked sand, they look like relics from some near-future archaeology, objects left behind when a digital civilization met a physical one. Both readings are valid, and I suspect Essesi wanted both.

There’s a question that lingers with this kind of work: who is it actually for? Collectible design at this level lives in a narrow category, somewhere between fine art and functional furniture, and it tends to attract a specific kind of buyer. But I’d argue that the Ghost Collection has a wider cultural reach than its price point might suggest. The pixel, as a visual symbol, has never been more loaded. A generation that grew up toggling between 8-bit games and ultra-HD screens carries a real emotional relationship with the idea of resolution. Essesi is tapping into that, not cynically, but with a genuine design point to make about what we find beautiful and why.

Whether or not you’d actually put a pixelated walnut ottoman in your living room, the Ghost Collection earns its name. These objects feel like furniture passing between states, fully formed and slightly out of phase at the same time. That’s a hard thing to design. Most pieces end up fully in one world or the other. These ones don’t, and that’s exactly what makes them worth paying attention to.

The post Half Pixel, Half Mirror: The Ghost Collection That Blurs Both Worlds first appeared on Yanko Design.

The $9,000 Lounge Chair That Spent 20 Years Becoming a Workspace

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Lounge seating hasn’t changed much in the past half century. The category has largely coasted on the same formula: a cushioned shell, a recline mechanism, and a vague gesture toward comfort. Meanwhile, the way people actually use chairs has shifted dramatically. People answer emails in living rooms, take video calls from hotels, read on tablets at reclined angles, and switch between devices constantly throughout the day. The furniture beneath them, for the most part, was never designed for any of that.

The Diffrient Lounge started as a concept over 20 years ago, and the gap it was meant to close has only grown wider since then. What distinguishes it from the lounge chairs that came before isn’t any one feature but the philosophy behind all of them together. Rather than building a comfortable chair that happens to have a few add-ons, the Diffrient Lounge was engineered from the ground up as a self-contained work and rest environment, with proprietary systems developed specifically for it rather than borrowed from existing furniture components.

Designer: Humanscale

The central mechanism, called Dynamic Comfort, allows the backrest and headrest to move in concert at the touch of a button. Motorized adjustments glide both elements smoothly between positions, keeping the spine in its natural curve and the head supported across a wide range of angles. The result is a chair that works just as well for a 30-minute focused writing session as it does for a reclined afternoon of reading, without having to compromise one for the other.

An integrated worksurface pivots into place for a laptop, tablet, or notebook and stows away when it isn’t needed, and two built-in USB-C ports handle power without requiring a nearby outlet. The upper port delivers 140W for laptops; the lower delivers 30W for phones and smaller devices. The power module is also designed to be upgradable independently of the chair itself, which is a detail worth noting at this price point. The chair is available from $8,995 and can reach upward of $15,000 in full configuration.

Materiality gets the same level of attention as the engineering. The upholstery runs across Kvadrat and Dedar textiles and alternative leathers from Ultrafabrics, while the worksurface can be specified in solid walnut, solid oak, or a low-sheen laminate. Over 352 finish combinations are available, which makes it equally suited to a residential living room, a hotel lobby, an executive office, or a wellness suite. The chair doesn’t ask those environments to adapt to it.

The technology throughout is deliberately quiet. There are no visible displays, no control interfaces beyond two levers, and nothing that announces itself as tech. The engineering, as with the best consumer hardware, disappears into the experience of sitting in the chair. A person using it for a long video call doesn’t think about the headrest angle; they just notice they aren’t uncomfortable.

It earned the iF Design Award 2026 and holds the distinction of being one of the final projects conceived by a mid-century design pioneer before his death in 2013. Humanscale spent years developing the proprietary systems that the original concept demanded, treating the project less like a furniture line and more like a device requiring its own purpose-built mechanisms. That timeline shows, and so does the result.

The post The $9,000 Lounge Chair That Spent 20 Years Becoming a Workspace first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Plywood Chair That Becomes a Castle in 2 Moves

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Plywood chairs are everywhere. You’ve seen them stacked in cafes, pulled up to dining tables, photographed on every other design account you follow. They’re functional, they’re affordable, and they’re largely forgettable. So when Irish furniture designer James Murphy sat down to create one for his university final project, the logical thing would have been to make something clean and well-proportioned and move on. Instead, he made a chair that unfolds into a castle, and now I can’t stop thinking about it.

The Casul chair is a children’s seat that, in just two moves, transforms into an abstract plywood castle with battlements, shelves, and enough narrative potential to fuel an entire afternoon. In its closed form, it has the neat, compact profile of a small throne. Flip the seat panels open, fold the legs out to the sides, and suddenly you have something that looks like a doll’s house crossed with a medieval fort. The panels that held the seat become shelves. The window cutouts in the backrest align with the fortifications. The whole thing opens up the way good architecture does: logically, inevitably, like it couldn’t have been designed any other way.

Designer: James Murphy

Murphy’s path to this project is worth noting. He began as a furniture designer, then did a work placement at Lego during university and came back with a new obsession. “Designing products for children is just really fun and rewarding,” he said. His final-year brief became a mission to marry both interests, and also to address something a lot of parents quietly worry about: how to pull kids away from screens without making it feel like a punishment.

The design references he leaned on are genuinely interesting. He looked back at post-war transformable children’s furniture, particularly Hans Brockhage’s Schaukelwagen from the 1950s, a rocking chair that flips into a toy car. That piece had a real ingenuity to it, born from an era when materials were scarce and cleverness was a necessity. Murphy borrowed the spirit of it but updated the logic entirely. The castle setting was a deliberate choice: gender-neutral enough for any child, open-ended enough for any game.

The engineering behind it is more nuanced than it looks. The jigsaw joints cut into the wooden seat panel interlock to keep the chair stable during use, but release easily to form the castle’s outer walls. Specialized friction hinges hold the opened panels at whatever angle the child wants, while also preventing fingers from getting caught. Triangular buttresses at the back keep the whole structure from tipping, and the combined weight of the piece means younger kids can’t accidentally knock it over. Murphy tested a remarkable number of hinge types to get the movement right. “I didn’t even know there were that many types of hinges,” he admitted, which tells you more about the obsessive detail of the process than any portfolio description could.

Two versions exist. One is finished in chalkboard paint, so children can redecorate the castle walls as often as they like. The other hides foam swords under the seat and cushions that convert into shields, the kind of detail that makes you realize this was genuinely designed with play behavior in mind, not just aesthetics. Both discoveries came partly from play-testing with real children. A girl who kept wanting to draw all over the clean plywood prototype was the reason the chalkboard version exists. The same test sessions turned the castle into a unicorn cafe, a besieged fort, and Bowser’s Castle from Super Mario, which is probably the most useful design feedback any furniture designer has ever received.

The Casul chair has since won one of the top prizes at London’s New Designers showcase, and it deserves the recognition. Good children’s design is harder than it looks, because the standards are unforgiving. Kids don’t pretend to like things. If a toy doesn’t hold their attention, it’s on the floor in ten minutes. The fact that Murphy’s chair passed that test, across multiple children and multiple imaginary worlds, tells you everything about how well he understood the brief.

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This foldable outdoor chair occupies the same amount of space as a soundbar

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A car may be designed to get you from one place to another, but the most memorable parts of a journey often happen in the pauses. The roadside stop. The quiet view after a long drive. The spontaneous coffee break that turns into an afternoon outside. Took, an industrial design and mobility lifestyle concept, builds its entire experience around those in-between moments.

At its core, Took is a portable chair system designed for people who see driving as more than transportation. It responds to a growing shift in mobility culture, where car-based lifestyles are becoming lighter, more casual, and more integrated into everyday life. Auto camping and quick outdoor breaks turn the vehicle into a small basecamp for rest, play, and self-expression. Took fits neatly into this world by staying ready in the trunk, waiting for the moment someone decides to stop, unfold, and simply enjoy where they are.

Designer: Jimin Nam, Donggwan Heo, and 민석 김

What makes the idea compelling is that it does not frame sustainability as a heavy responsibility. Instead, Took presents it as a style of living. The project defines this attitude as “Eco-core,” a lifestyle where green values become part of personal expression rather than a grand statement. Much like carrying a tumbler or picking up litter during a walk, sustainability here feels casual, visual, and habitual. Took imagines what that mindset could look like in a mobility lifestyle: familiar drives becoming small adventures, and ordinary stops becoming opportunities for more mindful rest.

The material story gives the product its emotional weight. When cars reach the end of their life, airbags and seatbelts are usually discarded, despite being made from materials engineered to protect, absorb impact, and bear load. Took reclaims these materials and gives them a second role. Once designed to guard the driver during movement, they now support the driver during stillness. It is a thoughtful form of recycling because it preserves the memory of the car’s protective function while giving it a new, softer purpose.

The chair itself is designed around immediacy. Conventional outdoor gear can feel like an entire event before the actual rest even begins. Took removes that friction through a compact case, strap handle, and one-touch hinge mechanism. The case fits neatly in the trunk, keeps the chair protected, and makes it easy to carry from car to destination. Once there, the system unfolds in a single motion. Extend the legs, drape the recycled skin, and the chair is ready. The gesture is simple enough to feel almost ceremonial: arrive, open, rest.

That simplicity is important because Took is not trying to compete with heavy-duty camping equipment. It is designed for the light, everyday outdoor moment. A short break during a road trip. A sunset stop after work. A quiet parking spot by the water. It makes comfort feel accessible without demanding planning, packing, or a complicated setup.

The concept also extends beyond the physical chair. Took imagines driving itself as a more engaging sensory experience through a digital layer called “Play Your Drive.” Instead of treating efficiency as a dry metric, the interface turns it into live feedback. Fluid circles respond to pedaling behavior, while an energy recovery ring helps the driver understand and balance their movement. The result is a playful system where greener driving feels visible, responsive, and rewarding.

This lifestyle approach continues through small accessories, including a carabiner for the car key. It acts as both a practical holder and a personal object, something that can reflect the driver’s identity. With an added opener function, it quietly supports the kind of relaxed, outdoor ritual Took is built around. Even the welcome package considers the full journey, from active driving to parking, offering the brand’s first greeting as a thoughtful gesture of privacy and care.

Took feels relevant because it understands that future mobility will not only be about smarter vehicles or autonomous systems. It will also be about how people inhabit the spaces around those vehicles. As software-defined vehicles and seamless mobility experiences continue to evolve, the car may become less of a machine we operate and more of a companion in daily life. Took leans into that possibility with warmth, lightness, and a clear sense of purpose.

It does not ask users to become outdoor experts or sustainability activists. It simply makes room for a better pause. With one compact chair, recycled automotive materials, and a playful driving ecosystem, Took turns the ordinary car journey into something more personal, more expressive, and more worth remembering.

The post This foldable outdoor chair occupies the same amount of space as a soundbar first appeared on Yanko Design.

Forget Smart Homes, Moooi Is Designing Homes That Feel Alive

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Light moves through trees. Shadows stretch and shrink. No two afternoons ever look quite the same. Moooi wants your living room to borrow that same restlessness. In a conversation with Yanko Design, the Dutch design house laid out a vision for interiors that respond to time, mood and the people living inside them, rather than staying frozen in one fixed arrangement from the day they’re installed.

It is a strange kind of ambition for a furniture brand to have. Strange but brilliant. Moooi has spent 25 years refusing to make boring things, and its next chapter looks less like a product catalog and more like a philosophy for how homes should feel. Not smarter. Not more automated. Just more alive, in the same unpredictable way the outside world already is.

Designer: Moooi

The concept has a name, The Living Room, and it started as a simple question the brand kept circling back to. What if an interior never sat still, but moved through a day the way the world outside a window does, gradually and without announcing itself. Lighting could soften as morning turns to afternoon. Objects could shift subtly in response to who’s in the room and what they’re doing. Nothing about it reads as gimmick or gadgetry, which is deliberate, since Moooi keeps insisting this has nothing to do with sensors or automation. It reads instead like weather indoors, a mood that drifts rather than a setting you toggle. That distinction matters more than it sounds.

Atmosphere has subtly become the real product Moooi sells, and everything else follows from it. The brand says its process now starts with a single question, how do people want to feel the moment they walk in, long before anyone picks a fabric or a finish. That thinking explains why Moooi’s catalog has crept well past furniture and lighting into wallcoverings, carpets, ceramic tiles and even bespoke scent. Each addition exists to thicken the sensory layer of a room rather than decorate its surface. Building a mood board was never the goal. Building an entire world was.

Personalization is where the philosophy stops being poetic and starts getting genuinely strange, in the best sense. Moooi’s collaboration with EveryHuman uses AI to translate a person’s mood into a custom room fragrance, treating scent as another material a designer can shape rather than an afterthought sprayed in before guests arrive. That same instinct extends to digitally printed carpets and layered surfaces built around individual taste instead of a single house style. The brand frames this as giving creative tools to people rather than finished products, which flips the usual furniture relationship on its head. You are not buying a chair here. You are being handed the freedom to keep shaping a space as your own taste evolves.

None of this would land without Moooi’s oldest habit, which the brand still describes as an ambition to stop the boring business. That mantra showed up loudly at the brand’s 25th anniversary installation in Milan this year, a mirrored, multi sensory environment built at Superstudio Più with choreographer Yoann Bourgeois, layering light, movement and scent into something meant to be felt rather than simply viewed. Marcel Wanders has said there’s no one who walks through a Moooi installation feeling nothing, and that stubborn refusal to be neutral is the connective tissue between a 2001 startup and a 2026 AI fragrance experiment.

Where this goes next is of more consequence than where it started. Moooi has been clear that technology should function as another creative material, sitting alongside craft and color rather than steering the whole show. If The Living Room concept ever leaves the realm of installation and lands inside actual homes, it will be a genuinely different pitch than anything coming out of the smart home industry right now. Not a house that watches you. A house that keeps you company.

The post Forget Smart Homes, Moooi Is Designing Homes That Feel Alive first appeared on Yanko Design.

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.

The post Eran’s Steel Furniture Displays Books Like Artifacts Worth Keeping first appeared on Yanko Design.

IKEA Finally Made Furniture You Can Carry Out When You Move Apartments

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Moving furniture in a city without a car involves a lot of improvisation. You carry what you can, leave what you can’t, and replace what got lost somewhere between the last three apartments. For a lot of renters in their twenties, heavy furniture isn’t something you accumulate. It’s something you abandon. IKEA designers sat with that problem after visiting a series of London homes of young renters and watching the improvised solutions people were actually living with.

The result is KOMPISHÄNG, a collection of 11 portable pieces launching in the US in August 2026, built from solid pine, powder-coated steel, and durable canvas. The brief was direct: design furniture that can be moved with your body alone, without needing a car. Everything in the collection takes that constraint seriously, and the problem-solving starts the moment you pick something up.

Designer: IKEA

The desk assembles with two pulls and two clicks, no tools required, and has a built-in handle underneath so it can be carried from one room to another without putting anything else down. The side table folds almost completely flat and can be carried over the arm like a handbag. The mattress and pouffe have adjustable shoulder straps and travel like a backpack, then unfold into a guest bed or collapse into an extra seat when no one’s visiting.

The two stackable stools, priced at $60 for a set, are probably the most quietly clever pieces in the collection. They nest into each other for storage, but their legs also interlock to form a tiered shelving unit, turning two stools into a small display surface for a plant, a lamp, or a stack of books. It’s the kind of dual-function logic that feels genuinely thought through rather than incidental.

The accessories follow the same thinking. The canvas wardrobe organizer converts to a carry bag with one zip, so clothes travel already sorted rather than packed from scratch. The jute plant pot has large handles and a built-in rolling cover that protects whatever’s inside during transit, removing the usual anxiety around moving a plant. The red metal bookend with handles is one of IKEA’s more self-aware pieces: a bookshelf that knows most rentals don’t have one.

The pieces are priced between $9.99 and $99.99, which keeps the stakes low enough that replacing a piece or passing it to the next tenant isn’t a loss. The creative team behind the collection put longevity on the brief, too: the textiles can be washed, the wood furniture can be sanded and repainted, and the stated hope is that pieces move from one person to the next rather than ending up discarded. For furniture designed around the reality of constant change, the expectation of a long life is a telling detail.

The post IKEA Finally Made Furniture You Can Carry Out When You Move Apartments first appeared on Yanko Design.