Tag Archives: Luxury

An AI Gave Me A Full-Body Massage: Hands-on with DaVinci AI Pro Massage Chair at IFA 2026

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Somewhere out there is a bingo card of jobs AI would come for, and I guarantee nobody had masseuse on it. AI has already eaten its way through a scary chunk of the low-level workforce, copywriting, junior coding, customer support scripts, even the guy behind the wheel in some cities now. But there was always this quiet assumption that a good deep tissue rubdown needed actual human hands, actual human judgment, someone who could feel where the knot was and adjust on the fly. That felt safe. Untouchable, even. Then I walked into Bodyfriend’s booth at IFA 2026, sat down in a chair, and casually talked my way into the best massage of the show. Apparently the human-to-human touch job just got automated too.

The chair was Bodyfriend’s DaVinci AI, running the same generative AI Bodyfriend had just unleashed in Seoul days before IFA, badged DaVinci AI Pro. Instead of picking from a shelf of presets, it listens to plain language and builds a massage from scratch, mixing 134 basic blocks across body zones, pressure, and duration. Bodyfriend puts the theoretical combinations in the trillions, and having felt the difference, I believe the math. A PPG sensor in the hand massager also reads heart rate, heart rate variability, and blood oxygen in real time, so the chair responds to your actual state, not just your words. I did not know any of this walking in. I just knew I was tired, sore, and willing to talk to a chair like it owed me something.

Designer: Bodyfriend

I had clocked around 15,000 steps that day, running on trade show coffee and basically nothing else, and my feet and shoulders had reached the point of open rebellion. I sat down, and instead of hunting for a remote, I just talked to the tablet mounted on the armrest. “Hey Buddy,” I said, “give me a strong foot massage, and also help relieve tension in my neck and shoulders.” Within about a minute it had built something specifically for that, working my feet, shoulders, and spine while leaving my hands completely alone, because I never asked for them. When I got a flicker of FOMO and asked it to include a hand massage too, it recalibrated on the spot rather than restarting from zero. Talking to it felt closer to briefing a person than operating a machine.

The DaVinci name carries some real design pedigree behind it. Bodyfriend’s earlier DaVinci models were developed with Italdesign, the Turin studio behind decades of concept and production cars for names like Lamborghini and Bugatti, and that automotive language shows up in the chair’s sculpted shell and the confidence of its proportions. This year’s leap is less about the shell and entirely about what is happening inside it. Where the original DaVinci used bioelectrical impedance analysis to profile your body composition, the AI Pro generation swaps that for conversational intelligence, a shift from measuring you passively to actually listening to you. It is the difference between a chair that studies your body and one that takes instructions from it.

Bodyfriend’s booth this year also carried the 733, a wearable healthcare robot that took home an IFA Innovation Award honor for independently guiding your arms and legs through stretching and standing assistance, proof this is a company betting hard on robotics well beyond the living room recliner. Against that backdrop, DaVinci AI reads less like a gimmick and more like the company’s flagship idea about where home wellness tech goes next. We covered Bodyfriend’s Quantum robotic chair at IFA 2024 and called it a bodygasm in leather and Bang & Olufsen sound. DaVinci AI trades some of that theater for something quieter and arguably bigger: a chair that finally understands what you are asking for, in your own words, on the first try.

The post An AI Gave Me A Full-Body Massage: Hands-on with DaVinci AI Pro Massage Chair at IFA 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

Motorola’s Swarovski Razr Was Designed to Be Seen, Not Hidden

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Motorola built a phone that asks to be noticed before it’s even unfolded. The 2026 motorola razr with Crystals by Swarovski joins the Brilliant Collection at IFA 2026, pairing Pantone’s color expertise with Swarovski’s craftsmanship on a foldable that reads less like consumer electronics and more like a clutch bag someone forgot was also a smartphone. It’s Motorola’s clearest statement yet that a phone’s exterior deserves as much attention as its chipset.

That statement starts with PANTONE Meteorite, a deep, understated shade that never competes for attention against the crystals resting on top of it. Instead, the finish creates contrast, revealing different dimensions of light and sparkle as the phone moves, so a simple pocket check under a restaurant table catches light differently than the same motion under office fluorescents. Color, in this case, does the quiet work of making everything layered on top of it shine harder.

Designer: Motorola x Swarovski

That layering happens across a quilted, leather-inspired texture that already feels premium before a single crystal enters the picture. Set against that padded surface, 35 hand-positioned Swarovski Crystals in Silver Night catch light from nearly any angle, each one placed with enough precision that the pattern reads as intentional rather than scattered. It’s the kind of detail that rewards a second glance rather than exhausting itself after the first one.

One crystal earns special treatment. A signature 32-facet Swarovski Crystal sits directly on the hinge, catching light with every flip in a way that turns the phone’s most mechanical motion into its most theatrical one. Razr’s flip has always been a small performance, and Motorola clearly understood that placing its biggest crystal exactly where the hinge pivots would turn an everyday gesture into something worth watching happen.

Motorola ships the device with a clear protective case built to frame the design without hiding it, a detail that matters more than it initially sounds. Plenty of phone cases exist purely to protect a device at the cost of concealing whatever made it desirable in the first place. Here, the case reads more like a museum vitrine than a rubber shell, letting the crystal work stay visible through daily handling.

None of that styling comes at the expense of the hardware underneath. A 6.9-inch Extreme AMOLED display unfolds for daily use, backed by a dual 50MP main camera system and a 4800mAh battery rated for more than 36 hours on a single charge. The external 3.6-inch display still runs full apps and handles notifications without requiring an unfold, keeping the phone functional even when someone’s more focused on how it catches light in a bag.

Motorola frames the Brilliant Collection as proof that technology can be both beautiful and intelligent, and this razr backs that framing with hardware that would hold its own even without a single crystal attached. Pricing lands at $899.99 when the phone arrives on Motorola.com and Amazon on September 10, with Verizon carrying it starting September 24, putting genuine jewelry-adjacent design within reach of anyone willing to treat a phone as an actual accessory.

The post Motorola’s Swarovski Razr Was Designed to Be Seen, Not Hidden first appeared on Yanko Design.

MB&F’s Alien-Inspired Desk Clock Ships as 222 Loose Parts You Assemble Yourself Over 10 Hours

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There is a term in behavioral economics called the IKEA effect, which says we value things more when we build them ourselves. It explains why you defend that wobbly BILLY bookcase like it’s family. MB&F and French clockmaker Maison Alcée have taken that idea, put it in a suit, and charged CHF 12,000 for it. Their new desk clock arrives at your door as 222 loose components in a wooden box, along with a set of watchmaking tools and a 250-page book. You are the assembly line, and the clock does not tell time until you make it.

It’s called the Nostromo, and it looks like a chrome beetle crouching on your desk. Maximilian Maertens, MB&F’s creative designer and Max Büsser’s anointed successor, designed it to celebrate 15 years of the M.A.D.Gallery. Maison Alcée manufactures the parts in the French and Swiss Jura, then hands the fun part to you. Roughly ten hours of tweezer work stand between the box and a running mechanical clock with a 14-day power reserve and a switchable hour chime. Only the regulating organ arrives pre-built, because some things are best left to people who do this for a living. Fifty pieces exist.

Designer: Maximilian Maertens for MB&F, crafted by Maison Alcée

The body is a symmetrical steel ovoid, two brushed arcs meeting top and bottom, wrapped around brass wheels and a saturated peacock blue dial ring floating dead center. That silhouette reads as carapace rather than xenomorph, closer to a scarab than anything H.R. Giger ever airbrushed. Every ounce of creature in this object lives in the three tapered legs below, which sweep outward in compound curves and end in points. Maertens had to leave the movement architecture assemblable by amateurs, so the sculpture went where the freedom was.

That movement comes from the Persée, Maison Alcée’s first clock, launched in 2022 and built on wristwatch architecture scaled up to desk size. Maertens turned the whole thing on its side, angled the display upward for easier reading, and split the Persée’s continuous dial ring into segments so the gear train shows through the gaps. The finished clock rotates on its feet, which sounds like a gimmick until you remember three-point support never rocks on an uneven desk. Black hands replace the originals for contrast against all that brass. The changes are small in engineering terms and enormous in posture.

Slotted screws sit visible across every plate, the steel is brushed instead of polished, and the brass wheels carry plain spokes with no anglage anywhere. That reads as a deliberate call rather than a cost saving, because every one of those surfaces will be handled by someone in cotton gloves who has never held tweezers. Maison Alcée even had its screwdriver blades made in a copper-beryllium alloy, softening them specifically to reduce the risk of scratching your own clock. The kit includes seventeen tools, several adapted for beginners. The pedagogy runs all the way down to the hardware.

Ridley Scott borrowed the name Nostromo from a Joseph Conrad novel, and Ron Cobb designed the ship as a grimy commercial tugboat crewed by people arguing about bonuses. Giger got the monster and the derelict. Most of us have merged the two in memory, which is why the word now sounds biomechanical. Maertens, a self-declared Giger obsessive, has effectively put Cobb’s name on a Giger-adjacent body, and I doubt anyone at MB&F loses sleep over it. The brand has been mining outer space since HM1 in 2007.

CHF 12,000 ($14,840 USD) excluding VAT, sold through the M.A.D.Galleries in Geneva and Dubai and MB&F LABs worldwide, with deliveries landing October to November. A base Persée runs closer to EUR 5,500 ($6,379 USD), so the premium buys the Maertens design and the 50-piece cap rather than more mechanism. Here’s the catch, though. A company whose entire philosophy is teaching horology through your own hands has capped this particular lesson at fifty units for fifty eager students. The clock is wonderful. The classroom is very small.

The post MB&F’s Alien-Inspired Desk Clock Ships as 222 Loose Parts You Assemble Yourself Over 10 Hours first appeared on Yanko Design.

Rezvani Beast X: The 1,560 HP American Hypercar Wearing a Fighter Jet’s Aero Kit Over a Corvette’s Body

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Ferris Rezvani grew up on air bases watching his dad fly F-4 Phantoms, wanted to be a pilot, got told no for health reasons, and decided the next best thing was making cars that scared people the same way. That origin story has been decorating press releases for a decade. The Beast X is the first Rezvani where the hardware backs it up, with canards, an S duct venting through three raised hood strakes, fender extractors, a roof scoop and a twin hoop rear wing sitting over a triple exit exhaust buried in the diffuser. It costs around $500,000, only five will exist, and Rezvani claims 1,560 horsepower.

That figure comes from a bespoke twin turbo 6.2 liter V8 with forged internals, driving all four wheels through an eight speed dual clutch for a claimed 1.9 seconds to 60. Underneath all of it sits a Corvette C8, which Rezvani’s spec page pointedly declines to name while listing a 107.2 inch wheelbase and 48.6 inch height that match Chevrolet’s exactly. The body is five inches longer and six inches wider. Everything Rezvani actually designed happens in those six inches, and the cabin gives the rest of the game away.

Designer: Rezvani Motors

The dive planes flanking the nose push air around the front wheels instead of into them, cutting front lift at speed. The S duct punches two vertical slots through the hood so pressurized air trapped under the splitter has somewhere to escape upward, a piece of open wheel racing hardware that has no business on a road car and shows up here anyway. Fender extractors pull hot, turbulent air out from the wheel wells before it can drag on the body. The twin hoop wing sits high on carbon pylons, clear of the turbulence coming off the roofline, and the triple exit exhaust clusters dead center in the diffuser instead of tucked at a corner. None of it is decorative. Every panel is doing one specific aerodynamic job, which is the difference between a body kit and an aero package.

Magnesium wheels cut seven pounds of unsprung mass at each corner, meaningful because unsprung weight is what suspension has to control on every bump rather than just accelerate. Adaptive double wishbone suspension handles the rest. That’s real engineering spend, and it’s where a chunk of the $500,000 clearly goes, even with the donor chassis unnamed on the spec sheet.

Open the door and the C8 shows through. The vertical wall of climate buttons running down the center stack is unchanged Chevrolet hardware, retrimmed in Alcantara and leather with contrast stitching and a Beast X badge on the wheel. Rezvani is doing what Italian coachbuilders did for decades, buying a proven chassis and building a new body over it, except the receipts and the fantasy are published on the same webpage. The exterior is a genuine transformation. The interior is a retrim job with better stitching.

Chevrolet’s own ZR1X makes 1,250 horsepower, hits 60 in 1.89 seconds, and starts at $207,395 with a factory warranty. Rezvani wants roughly $293,000 more for six extra inches of width, a full carbon body, and a production cap of five cars, with no independent dyno numbers behind the 1,560 hp claim yet. That’s either a steep markup for a retrim or the going rate for a body engineered like it has to survive actual airflow at speed and a promise that only four other people on earth will own one. Rezvani’s reservation lists have filled fast before. Nothing here suggests this run will be the exception.

The post Rezvani Beast X: The 1,560 HP American Hypercar Wearing a Fighter Jet’s Aero Kit Over a Corvette’s Body first appeared on Yanko Design.

Urwerk Built a Hand-Carved Pocket Watch That Tracks Time for 1,000 Years

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Florian Güllert spends most of his working life engraving shotguns. His bench sits in Klagenfurt, in Carinthia, an Austrian province with zero watchmaking history and a four-century run of decorating hunting weapons. Urwerk handed him a raw titanium blank and asked him to bury the most sci-fi pocket watch ever built under Baroque ornament. He said yes, spent roughly 500 hours over three months, and produced the UR-1001 Amadeus, a piece unique that looks like a cathedral swallowed a computer. Gun engraving exists because a tool meant to outlive its owner gets decorated, which turns out to be this watch’s entire argument.

The Amadeus measures 106 by 62 by 23mm and shows satellite hours, retrograde minutes, an annual calendar, day and night, and a 39-hour power reserve on the front. The hinged caseback adds an oil-change indicator that turns red through years four and five, a counter tracking 100 years of running time, and a linear scale that climbs to 1,000. Güllert laser-cut the contours before touching it by hand, since titanium galls and work-hardens under a graver in ways precious metal does not. Every engraved surface stops at the sapphire. Inside, Urwerk’s matte black instrument panel carries on as though the ornament never happened.

Designers: Martin Frei and Florian Güllert for Urwerk

Titanium punishes a graver the way a stubborn hinge punishes a screwdriver, so Güllert’s first move was unfamiliar territory for a man used to steel. He rough-cut the relief with a laser, then went back in by hand with pneumatic chisels and files, balancing thick strokes against thin ones until the pattern read as depth rather than line. Backgrounds got textured, dotted, satin-brushed, or left matte depending on how he wanted light to catch each panel. Every edge was filed and rebalanced until the boundary between case and decoration effectively disappeared. That is a genuinely different skill set than cutting a scroll into a shotgun receiver, and it shows in how uneven the difficulty was across the piece.

The flanks and bezel run pure Baroque, scrolling acanthus leaves that could sit on an 18th century snuffbox. The caseback centerpiece is something else entirely, a quatrefoil rose-window panel with cusped Gothic arches framing the movement aperture, and the winding crown at 12 has been carved into an actual fluted coronet. Baroque excess on the outside, ecclesiastical stonework on the back, industrial sans-serif labeling the instruments inside. Three separate design languages sharing one case, none of them arguing with the others.

Three-armed satellite hours hand off to a retrograde minute display, three running-seconds hands split a minute into 20-second stretches, and a satellite annual calendar runs on three Maltese crosses riding a 93-tooth date wheel. Flip the watch over and the oil-change dial, calibrated for five-year service intervals, feeds a counter that advances in five-year steps toward a full century. Every hundred years, that counter sends a pulse to a linear scale on the caseback graduated all the way to 1,000. Yes, this pocket watch has a mechanical millennium indicator, and yes, it is exactly as absurd and wonderful as it sounds.

The UR-1001 has been Urwerk’s flagship strange object since 2011, when eight AlTiN-cased examples sold out at CHF 340,000 each, a number early buyers reportedly called cheap for what it did. We covered Urwerk’s other engraved oddities before, including the UR-210 Amadeus that first paired Güllert with the brand back in 2017, and the ambition here is visibly larger. Urwerk has not disclosed a price for this one, which tracks for a commissioned piece unique. Felix Baumgartner named it for Mozart, calling the composer a brilliant madman, and says he wanted a case as daring as the mechanics inside it.

Here is the part nobody selling this watch will say out loud. The 100-year and 1,000-year counters only advance while the movement is actually running, and a piece unique this expensive tends to spend its life in a safe rather than a pocket. Baumgartner’s own language calls the eventual buyer a custodian rather than an owner, which is a lovely way of admitting the millennium scale may never move past zero. A gunsmith spent 500 hours making sure it would look magnificent the whole time it doesn’t.

The post Urwerk Built a Hand-Carved Pocket Watch That Tracks Time for 1,000 Years first appeared on Yanko Design.

Urwerk Built a Hand-Carved Pocket Watch That Tracks Time for 1,000 Years

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Florian Güllert spends most of his working life engraving shotguns. His bench sits in Klagenfurt, in Carinthia, an Austrian province with zero watchmaking history and a four-century run of decorating hunting weapons. Urwerk handed him a raw titanium blank and asked him to bury the most sci-fi pocket watch ever built under Baroque ornament. He said yes, spent roughly 500 hours over three months, and produced the UR-1001 Amadeus, a piece unique that looks like a cathedral swallowed a computer. Gun engraving exists because a tool meant to outlive its owner gets decorated, which turns out to be this watch’s entire argument.

The Amadeus measures 106 by 62 by 23mm and shows satellite hours, retrograde minutes, an annual calendar, day and night, and a 39-hour power reserve on the front. The hinged caseback adds an oil-change indicator that turns red through years four and five, a counter tracking 100 years of running time, and a linear scale that climbs to 1,000. Güllert laser-cut the contours before touching it by hand, since titanium galls and work-hardens under a graver in ways precious metal does not. Every engraved surface stops at the sapphire. Inside, Urwerk’s matte black instrument panel carries on as though the ornament never happened.

Designers: Martin Frei and Florian Güllert for Urwerk

Titanium punishes a graver the way a stubborn hinge punishes a screwdriver, so Güllert’s first move was unfamiliar territory for a man used to steel. He rough-cut the relief with a laser, then went back in by hand with pneumatic chisels and files, balancing thick strokes against thin ones until the pattern read as depth rather than line. Backgrounds got textured, dotted, satin-brushed, or left matte depending on how he wanted light to catch each panel. Every edge was filed and rebalanced until the boundary between case and decoration effectively disappeared. That is a genuinely different skill set than cutting a scroll into a shotgun receiver, and it shows in how uneven the difficulty was across the piece.

The flanks and bezel run pure Baroque, scrolling acanthus leaves that could sit on an 18th century snuffbox. The caseback centerpiece is something else entirely, a quatrefoil rose-window panel with cusped Gothic arches framing the movement aperture, and the winding crown at 12 has been carved into an actual fluted coronet. Baroque excess on the outside, ecclesiastical stonework on the back, industrial sans-serif labeling the instruments inside. Three separate design languages sharing one case, none of them arguing with the others.

Three-armed satellite hours hand off to a retrograde minute display, three running-seconds hands split a minute into 20-second stretches, and a satellite annual calendar runs on three Maltese crosses riding a 93-tooth date wheel. Flip the watch over and the oil-change dial, calibrated for five-year service intervals, feeds a counter that advances in five-year steps toward a full century. Every hundred years, that counter sends a pulse to a linear scale on the caseback graduated all the way to 1,000. Yes, this pocket watch has a mechanical millennium indicator, and yes, it is exactly as absurd and wonderful as it sounds.

The UR-1001 has been Urwerk’s flagship strange object since 2011, when eight AlTiN-cased examples sold out at CHF 340,000 each, a number early buyers reportedly called cheap for what it did. We covered Urwerk’s other engraved oddities before, including the UR-210 Amadeus that first paired Güllert with the brand back in 2017, and the ambition here is visibly larger. Urwerk has not disclosed a price for this one, which tracks for a commissioned piece unique. Felix Baumgartner named it for Mozart, calling the composer a brilliant madman, and says he wanted a case as daring as the mechanics inside it.

Here is the part nobody selling this watch will say out loud. The 100-year and 1,000-year counters only advance while the movement is actually running, and a piece unique this expensive tends to spend its life in a safe rather than a pocket. Baumgartner’s own language calls the eventual buyer a custodian rather than an owner, which is a lovely way of admitting the millennium scale may never move past zero. A gunsmith spent 500 hours making sure it would look magnificent the whole time it doesn’t.

The post Urwerk Built a Hand-Carved Pocket Watch That Tracks Time for 1,000 Years first appeared on Yanko Design.

Your Child’s First Lambo Could Be This $3,995 Yellow Stroller – And It’s Rarer Than Most Supercars

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Your kid will own a Lamborghini roughly forty years before you do, and it will cost you $3,995 to make that happen. Silver Cross and Automobili Lamborghini just launched the Reef AL Giallo, a limited-run stroller finished in the yellow that made the Miura famous. Only 500 exist worldwide. Each one carries a numbered plaque in the footplate, the way limited-run supercars carry chassis numbers. It launched today, August 27, and it closes out a partnership that started with an orange version back in 2025.

Silver Cross has been building prams in Yorkshire since 1877, which makes it eleven years older than the internal combustion car business it just partnered with. The company was known for decades as the Rolls-Royce of prams, supplying George VI and the Queen Mother. Lamborghini was founded in 1963 by a tractor manufacturer with a grudge. Putting those two lineages on the same chassis should feel absurd. The odd thing is how carefully it has been done, right down to a debossed Y-pattern lifted from Lamborghini’s actual car interiors.

Designers: Silver Cross, Automobili Lamborghini

The carrycot is a high-gloss polycarbonate shell with integrated airflow, angled to echo the folded bonnet line of a supercar, and lined inside with automotive-grade suede. The pushchair seat pairs that suede with bamboo fibre and a multi-peak faceted hood. A genuine leather bumper bar wraps the front with embossed Lamborghini badging. The handlebar casting is finished by hand, and the brake pedal uses a step-on, step-off action designed not to scuff your shoes, which is the single most useful idea in the whole package. Even the storage basket gets origami-style folding so it holds its shape against the frame’s angles.

The hexagon and the Y have been Lamborghini’s structural grammar since Marcello Gandini started folding cars into wedges in the late sixties, and both show up in carbon weave, air intakes and seat stitching across the modern range. Silver Cross debossed the pattern rather than printing it. The colour strategy is similarly disciplined. Giallo (Italian for ‘yellow’) appears as piping, stitching, a harness liner and a wheel hub, while the body stays almost entirely black.

Now the maths. The Reef AL Giallo is built on the Reef 2, a Silver Cross stroller that normally sells between $999.99 and $1,299.99, so the $2,700 price bump accounts for the leather and suede, and that licensed logo. It also weighs 13.6kg, or about 30 lbs, which is double what a lot of parents lift into a car boot. A brand built on the pursuit of lightness has produced its heaviest possible interpretation of a pram. Folded, it measures L71 x W61 x H30.5cm, so boot space matters. Set against the Bentley Trike or Lamborghini’s licensed e-scooters, though, this is a far more serious object.

Silver Cross has announced this as the final edition, which is a scarcity mechanic as much as an editorial decision, and the resale market will treat it accordingly. Pair it with the orange Arancio we covered last year, and you have a matched set that some collector will absolutely chase. What sticks with me is the suspension. William Wilson’s 1877 breakthrough was spring suspension on a pram, and here those springs sit exposed on the chassis, sold as performance engineering. A 149-year-old British invention, wearing an Italian costume, and still doing its original job.

The post Your Child’s First Lambo Could Be This $3,995 Yellow Stroller – And It’s Rarer Than Most Supercars first appeared on Yanko Design.

Only 100 Will Own This $84,300 See-Through Hublot Watch

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I have a theory about luxury watches: the best ones don’t just tell time, they start conversations. The Hublot Big Bang Sapphire Sky Blue is exactly that kind of watch. It’s a 44mm piece of sky-blue transparency that makes you stop mid-sentence and stare, not because it’s flashy in the traditional sense, but because it looks almost impossibly light. Like someone poured an afternoon sky into a case and sealed it with titanium screws.

Hublot has been working with sapphire as a structural material since 2016, earning a reputation as the go-to house for pushing what this material can actually do. What started as a clear sapphire case has evolved into something more ambitious, and this new limited edition is a strong example of that progression. The 44mm case and bezel are crafted from fully polished sapphire crystal, not coated or tinted, but rendered in a genuine sky-blue transparency that shifts subtly depending on the light. Depending on how the light catches it, this watch can feel cool and airy or warm and atmospheric, a kind of visual fluidity that’s rare even in this price category. It’s the kind of color that doesn’t settle for one mood.

Designer: Hublot

The case is held together by Hublot’s signature H-shaped titanium screws, and if you’ve spent any time with the Big Bang line, you know those screws are as much a design statement as a structural one. The six-screw bezel is recognizable at a glance, and pairing that hardware with a transparent sapphire case feels like the right call. Nothing hides, everything is intentional. The strap continues the color story in structured sky-blue rubber, and the matte sky-blue skeleton dial and matching movement bridges create an immersive, coordinated picture that somehow avoids feeling one-dimensional.

None of that would matter as much without something genuinely interesting happening inside. The movement powering the Big Bang Sapphire Sky Blue is the HUB1201 Manufacture Meca-10, a caliber that debuted in 2016 and remains one of the most visually distinctive in modern watchmaking. It was designed around the movement itself rather than squeezed into a conventional watch architecture, and the influence of mechanical construction systems, almost Meccano-like in its visual logic, is impossible to miss. Two parallel mainspring barrels give the watch a 10-day power reserve, meaning you won’t be winding this one every morning. A rack-and-pinion mechanism moves two sliding racks across the dial to display that power reserve in a way that reads more like industrial art than traditional horology. Running seconds at 9 o’clock, power-reserve display at 6 o’clock, and through the sapphire caseback, you can see all of it in motion.

Most skeleton watches look beautiful and stop there. The Meca-10 is different because the architecture actually makes sense when you study it. The structure has visual logic even for someone who’s never read a watchmaking manual, and the sky-blue bridges and dial frame the movement rather than compete with it. That restraint is harder to pull off than it looks.

At $84,300, the Big Bang Sapphire Sky Blue is not a casual acquisition. With only 100 pieces produced worldwide, it lands firmly in serious collector territory, and the scarcity here feels genuinely earned. Crafting a colored sapphire case at this scale is a real engineering challenge, and that material ambition justifies the exclusivity more convincingly than a simple limited-edition number ever could.

Could you wear it every day? Possibly. Should you? That’s a more personal question. At 44mm with a very deliberate visual presence, this watch commands attention. With 50 meters of water resistance, it handles daily life comfortably, though anything more demanding than that would be pushing it.

The concept itself is what’s worth sitting with: a watch that bets entirely on material and mechanics, and asks you to find that more compelling than a gem-set dial or a celebrity campaign. For the right collector, that’s a very easy bet to take. The Big Bang Sapphire Sky Blue makes transparency, literal and otherwise, its entire argument. And it’s a persuasive one.

The post Only 100 Will Own This $84,300 See-Through Hublot Watch first appeared on Yanko Design.

Goldmund’s $500,000 Amp Is as Much a Sculpture as It Is a Machine

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High-end audio amplifiers tend to get bigger, heavier, and more expensive in the pursuit of performance headroom that most recordings will never fully demand. The formula is familiar: more transformer capacity, larger capacitor banks, thicker panels, and bigger heat sinks, all folded into a single imposing chassis. It’s an engineering approach that works, but it also introduces a fundamental compromise that most manufacturers quietly accept rather than solve.

The Goldmund Telos 9800 doesn’t accept it. For the first time in the Telos line, the power supply and amplification stages occupy completely separate enclosures, each allowed to do its single job without the electrical and mechanical interference that sharing a chassis inevitably introduces. Two interconnected volumes, one devoted entirely to power supply and one to amplification, form what Goldmund describes as the most advanced amplifier the company has ever made.

Designer: Goldmund

The power supply chassis is built around a 10 kVA transformer and a 648 mF capacitor bank, the largest Goldmund has ever engineered. That stored energy reserve exists not to push volume louder but to handle the sudden, intense current demands of complex musical passages and difficult loudspeaker loads without the amplifier flinching. The amplification stage draws from that reservoir freely, stable down to a 1-ohm load and fully galvanically isolated from its source.

Both chassis are machined from micro-blasted aluminium with 15 mm thick side panels and 40 mm thick radiator sections that function as passive heatsinks through natural convection. There are no fans, no active cooling components. A single gold plate marks the junction between the two volumes, a discreet visual signal where one enclosure ends and the other begins. Gold-plated copper terminals and screws appear at connection points throughout. The construction is available in grey or black.

The Telos 9800 is a monoblock, meaning each unit drives a single channel. A stereo pair requires two of them, bringing the combined weight to 720kg and the combined cost to approximately $1 million USD. Goldmund specifies that installation requires at least two trained technicians with appropriate lifting equipment, which may be the most understated sentence in any modern audio product launch.

At 1,367mm tall, the Telos 9800 stands in a room rather than sitting in it. The separation of functions into two physically distinct objects transforms an engineering decision into something closer to sculpture. Most amplifiers hide their internal architecture behind a single front panel. The Telos 9800 makes the architecture the design.

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People Are Putting This $3,000 Toilet on Their Wedding Registry

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The toilet is one of those objects we use every single day, and yet it has somehow remained completely untouched by the design revolution sweeping through every other corner of our homes. We’ll spend hours agonizing over sofa fabrics and kitchen tiles, losing sleep over the perfect pendant light, and debating grout colours as if our lives depend on it. But the toilet? That’s just functional. It’s white. It flushes. It hides in a corner and we try not to think about it too much. At least, that used to be the prevailing attitude.

Hugo Volpei had a very different idea. The French entrepreneur founded Trone in 2018 after a visit to Sketch, the legendary London restaurant known for its surreal, egg-pod bathroom interiors. Despite the theatrical setting, Volpei noticed the toilets themselves were still the same generic white fixtures you’d find in any ordinary home. It struck him immediately as a missed opportunity, and from that moment, he became fixated on a question most people had never thought to ask: why hasn’t anyone actually designed the toilet?

Designer: Hugo Volpei

Eight years later, Trone operates in around 30 countries, sells close to 3,000 toilets annually, and has done something that feels genuinely rare in consumer goods: created an entirely new product category. These aren’t toilets with a fresh coat of paint or a few extra features bolted on. They’re sculptural objects, made with the same intentionality you’d give to fine furniture, and offered in bold colours, unexpected finishes, and silhouettes that feel closer to art installations than to anything you’d typically find in a bathroom catalogue.

The models themselves are worth lingering on. Icone01 features a striking transparent water tank that stands tall behind the bowl like a glass column, using just three litres per flush. Callipyge has a beautifully rounded, almost architectural form that completely shifts the mood of any bathroom it occupies. Altesse, the smart toilet, has lines so refined it barely registers as a toilet at all. The most recent addition, simply called The Throne, replaces the traditional boxy shape with a tear-drop silhouette and a sliding door that makes the whole thing feel like a piece of furniture. Each piece is produced alongside French and Italian craftsmen, which explains both the remarkable level of finish and the premium price point, and gives Trone a coherent design identity that feels genuinely earned rather than simply claimed.

I appreciate that Volpei never tried to rebrand the toilet as something more palatable. He didn’t call it a “wellness station” or bury the product under layers of vague lifestyle marketing. He simply looked at a deeply neglected object and asked why it couldn’t also be beautiful. There’s a refreshing directness to that logic, and it’s one that resonates well beyond the design community. The idea that a toilet could hold its own in a design conversation, let alone lead it, should have seemed like a stretch. With Trone, it doesn’t.

Perhaps the strongest evidence that Trone has genuinely shifted how people think is this: some customers are now adding Trone toilets to their wedding registries and Christmas wish lists. Volpei describes this as “probably the greatest achievement of all,” and it’s hard to argue. Getting people to genuinely want a toilet as a gift requires a fundamental shift in cultural perception, and building that shift from scratch, with no existing market to reference, takes real conviction.

Trone’s clientele now spans restaurants, hotels, and hospitality groups across Europe, including names like Big Mamma and Paris Society. This makes complete sense. A beautifully designed toilet in a well-considered restaurant bathroom is exactly the kind of unexpected detail people photograph and talk about later. Volpei calls the product “an experience,” which sounds almost absurd in this context, until you remember that people are genuinely requesting these for birthdays and anniversaries. The toilet was always going to have its design moment. It just took someone stubborn enough to believe that no object is too humble to be worth caring about.

The post People Are Putting This $3,000 Toilet on Their Wedding Registry first appeared on Yanko Design.