This Headphone Stand Looks Like a Sculpture Even Without Headphones

Headphones usually end up draped over monitors, balanced on stacks of books, or left in a tangle on the desk. They are often the nicest piece of audio gear in the room, but rarely have a home that matches their presence. Most stands are plastic hooks or generic metal frames that disappear under the headband, doing their job but adding nothing to the space. Arco is a response to that gap, a stand that treats headphones like something worth giving a proper place.

Arco is a headphone stand designed to feel like a finished object, whether or not there is a pair of headphones resting on it. Carved from a single block of wood or stone, it has a smooth arc that gives the headband a gentle resting point and a solid base that reads more like a small piece of furniture than an accessory. When empty, it still looks complete, adding subtle presence to a shelf or desk.

Designer: latr.

Reaching for headphones becomes a small, deliberate gesture instead of fishing them out from under papers. When you are done listening, they go back to the same place, the arc catching the headband and lifting the earcups off the surface. Over time, that simple habit keeps the desk clearer and the headphones in better shape, protected from pressure points or deforming pads that come from stacking other things on top.

The wood versions, oak and walnut, bring warmth and visible grain to a shelf or sideboard. The stone versions, Portuguese limestone for subtlety and Guatemala marble for a stronger character, feel more like small monoliths anchoring a corner of the room. In each case, the material is chosen to sit comfortably among books, speakers, and other objects without shouting for attention or feeling like obvious “tech gear.”

Both wood and stone Arcos are CNC-machined from a single solid block, then finished entirely by hand to refine surfaces and edges while letting the natural character of the material remain visible. The arc and outer volume went through many sketches and prototypes until the proportions felt natural and there was nothing left that looked unresolved, which is why the form feels calm rather than generic or rushed.

Latr is a young design brand focused on lifestyle pieces with character for a more relaxed way of living. Arco fits that ethos by turning a purely functional object into something that quietly adds presence to a room, giving headphones a place in the open instead of hiding them away. It is easygoing and optimistic in its own way, inviting you to enjoy the small pleasure of a tidy, intentional audio corner.

Arco is not trying to reinvent storage; it is simply making one everyday object feel more considered. By giving headphones a stand that looks complete on its own, it turns a bit of visual noise into a small architectural moment. In rooms where so many accessories feel disposable or provisional, a single block of wood or stone that earns its place on the desk every day is a quiet kind of luxury.

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CW&T Machined a Mortar into a 1.31kg Spherical Steel Object

Grabbing a jar of pre-ground spice happens because the mortar and pestle are buried in a cabinet, or it feels like too much work. Most mortars are big, porous bowls that live in the back of a cupboard, coming out only for special recipes. CW&T’s Spicy is a different take, a mortar and pestle small and sculptural enough to live on the counter all the time, making it easier to reach for when you need it.

Spicy is a ball-and-socket style mortar and pestle machined from stainless steel. It is only about 66mm across and 60mm tall, but it weighs around 1.31kg, with a glass bead-blasted exterior and a rough interior surface. It holds about a tablespoon of spices, just enough for finishing a dish or grinding a small batch of seeds without pulling out the full kitchen arsenal.

Designer: CW&T

Dropping a pinch of peppercorns or cardamom into the cup and wrapping your hand around the spherical pestle, you roll and twist the ball against the rough interior, feeling the resistance and the way the spices break down under the weight. The continuous contact between ball and bowl makes the motion more like drawing circles than hammering, which is easier on the wrist and oddly satisfying.

The rather hefty mass keeps the mortar planted while you grind, so you are not chasing it around the counter. The glass bead exterior feels soft and matte in the hand, while the rough interior bites into seeds and dried herbs. A cork base cushions the action and protects the table but still lets the piece slide slightly if you want to reposition it mid-session.

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Spicy is machined from food- and dishwasher-safe stainless steel, so cleanup is as simple as rinsing or tossing both parts into the dishwasher. There is no porous stone to stain or absorb flavors, and no wooden handle to baby. That durability, combined with the compact footprint, makes it easy to justify leaving it on the counter next to oil and salt instead of packing it away.

Spicy is designed to pair with Salty, CW&T’s minimalist salt cellar, sharing the same cylindrical geometry and machined metal finish. Together, they turn a corner of the kitchen into a small landscape of dense, precise objects that invite touch. It fits into CW&T’s habit of over-building simple tools, so they feel like permanent fixtures rather than disposable gadgets.

Spicy is not trying to reinvent cooking; it is just making one small part of it feel more intentional. By compressing a mortar and pestle into a heavy, palm-sized ball and cup, it turns grinding spices into a quick, tactile ritual you might actually look forward to. Kitchens full of plastic grinders and pre-ground jars make freshly crushed spices feel like too much effort, but a tiny stainless-steel weight that lives on the counter is a quiet argument for doing one thing properly.

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UMBRELLA+ Moves the Umbrella Stand Off the Floor and Into Your Exit Routine

Leaving the house, getting halfway down the block, and realizing it is raining, but your umbrella is still in the bucket by the door, is familiar. Traditional umbrella stands live on the floor, out of sight and out of mind, collecting drips and getting kicked aside. The problem is not just storage. It is where that storage lives in the exit routine, and how easy it becomes to completely ignore.

UMBRELLA+ is a concept that revisits the umbrella stand by moving it onto the wall. It is a horizontal cylinder that receives the folded umbrella, intersected by a vertical wooden element that acts as a hook for bags or coats. The T-shaped gesture pulls the umbrella into your field of view at entry height, merging storage and hanging into one coherent system.

Designer: Germain Verbrackel

Getting ready to leave, you grab your coat, loop your bag onto the vertical bar, and the umbrella is right there in the same reach, tucked into the tube or hanging by its handle. Because it sits in the same visual band as the things you already check before walking out, you are less likely to leave it behind. The object rewires the routine by placing the umbrella where your hand already goes.

Coming back wet, the umbrella slides into the tube, where internal ribbing gives the fabric somewhere to rest without collapsing and lets air circulate. It is not a sealed drip tray, so some water may reach the floor, but the design assumes the umbrella is mostly shaken off before it goes inside, which is already part of most people’s entry ritual anyway.

The pairing of a cool, matte cylinder with a warm wooden bar lets UMBRELLA+ slide between different moods. In neutral grey and light wood, it blends into minimal entryways. In bronze and dark wood, it feels warmer and more premium. In full blue, it turns into a playful graphic object. That flexibility lets the same form read as a quiet background or deliberate accent.

UMBRELLA+ is designed for one umbrella plus a bag or coat, not a family with multiple umbrellas fighting for space. That constraint is part of what keeps it visually clean and behaviorally focused. It is a personal entryway object, not a communal storage solution, which makes the most sense in apartments or homes where one or two people are managing their own gear.

UMBRELLA+ is less about inventing a new function and more about moving an existing one into a different part of the wall and the routine. By elevating the umbrella physically and symbolically, it turns something easy to forget into something harder to ignore. Sometimes the best way to solve small daily friction is not a smarter object, but a smarter place to put it, especially when that place is already where you reach every time you leave.

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Tower Desk Organizer Turns a Strip of Desk into a Calm Landing Zone

Desks and side tables collect phones, glasses, remotes, pens, keys, and watches by the end of the day. The half-hearted attempts to corral them in a bowl or let them drift into a loose pile never quite work, and by the next morning, you are hunting for your phone under a stack of papers or fishing keys out from behind the lamp. What is missing is not more storage, but a small, clear structure that tells each thing where to go.

Yamazaki’s Tower Desk Organizer is a compact steel and wood bar that behaves more like a miniature piece of furniture than a generic tray. It has a slim base tray divided into two zones, a vertical post, and a raised wooden rest for watches or bracelets, all within a footprint that fits between a keyboard and monitor or next to a sofa arm.

Designer: Yamazaki Home

Sitting down at a desk in the morning, you drop your phone into one side of the tray, slide a pen and small notebook into the other, and hang a watch on the wooden bar while you type. The silicone mat keeps the phone from sliding when notifications buzz, and the low walls of the tray stop things from drifting under papers or behind the laptop. It becomes a predictable spot instead of another improvised pile.

By evening, the same organizer moves to a living room table, where it now holds a couple of remotes, reading glasses, and a phone while you watch something or read. The two compartments make it easy to separate tech from analog items, so you are not fishing for a remote under a pile of keys. The watch bar doubles as a small display for a bracelet or everyday watch when you are off the clock.

The powder-coated steel body with its textured matte finish, available in white or black, and the plywood top plate that adds a warm accent, feel more like a quiet architectural element than a gadget. The combination lets it blend into both minimal workspaces and softer living-room setups without drawing attention to itself, staying useful while staying calm.

The organizer is designed for smartphones, not tablets, and the watch bar comfortably holds two large watches rather than an entire collection. It is a home for a curated set of essentials, not a dumping ground. That constraint is part of what keeps it from turning into another overstuffed catch-all that defeats its own purpose and ends up just as messy as the pile it replaced.

The Tower Desk Organizer treats everyday clutter as something worth designing for at a structural level. By giving phones, glasses, remotes, and watches a simple base, post, and beam to relate to, it turns a messy corner of the room into a small, legible landscape. Sometimes the most effective organizing tools are not big systems with a dozen compartments, but a single, well-drawn line on the desk that quietly suggests where things belong.

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This Japanese Cabinet Uses Real Forest Branches as Doors

There’s something deeply satisfying about furniture that refuses to stay in one place. Not in the sense that it walks around your living room, but in how it adapts, shifts, and changes with you. Taishi Sugiura’s Hayashi Cabinet does exactly that, blurring the line between functional storage and something far more poetic.

The word “Hayashi” translates to “forest” in Japanese, and once you see this piece, the name makes perfect sense. Instead of traditional cabinet doors or panels, Sugiura uses actual Japanese cypress branches arranged across the front of the frame. These aren’t decorative touches glued on for aesthetic appeal. They’re the real deal, thinned branches that would typically be left discarded in the mountains after forest management. Sugiura saw potential where others saw waste.

Designer: Taishi Sugiura

What makes the Hayashi Cabinet genuinely clever is its movability. Each branch can slide left or right along the cabinet frame, letting you customize the openness or privacy of your storage space. Want to show off that vintage record collection? Slide the branches apart. Need to hide some clutter? Push them together. It’s like having adjustable blinds, except way cooler and made of wood.

This design philosophy stems from traditional Japanese spatial concepts. Think about shoji screens and sliding doors in Japanese homes, elements that define space without rigidly locking it down. Sugiura brings that same flexibility to furniture, creating something that responds to your changing needs rather than forcing you to work around it. Some days you want minimalist display, other days you need concealment. The Hayashi Cabinet doesn’t judge either choice.

The materials tell their own story. Japanese cypress branches have these gorgeous tight grains and natural curves that you’d never find in standard lumber. They’re inherently asymmetrical, which means no two cabinets will ever look identical. As light filters through the gaps between branches throughout the day, the shadows shift and dance, transforming the piece from static furniture into something almost kinetic. It’s the kind of detail that makes you notice your own furniture, which sounds strange until you realize how rarely that actually happens.

Sugiura studied at Nagoya University of Arts, and his material-first approach runs through all his work. Before designing the Hayashi Cabinet, he created the Kintoun Kits, playful modular construction sets that won a JID NEXTAGE silver prize. That same curiosity about how people interact with objects translates beautifully into this domestic context. It’s not just about looking good on an Instagram feed. It’s about living with something that genuinely adapts to you. We’re already flooded with mass-produced, one-size-fits-all storage solutions but here’s a piece that celebrates imperfection and individuality. The branches aren’t perfectly straight. They don’t align in rigid rows. They breathe.

There’s also an environmental angle worth noting. Using thinned cypress branches addresses a real problem in Japanese forestry, where these materials typically get abandoned as too difficult or low-value to process. By turning them into design features rather than treating them as scraps, Sugiura gives them new life and purpose. It’s sustainable design that doesn’t announce itself with green marketing buzzwords but simply makes smart material choices.

The beauty of the Hayashi Cabinet lies in its restraint. It could easily tip into gimmicky territory with all those moving parts, but Sugiura keeps the overall design clean and understated. The frame stays simple, letting the natural cypress branches become the focal point. And because you’re the one deciding how open or closed the front becomes, you’re essentially co-designing the piece every time you adjust it. The Hayashi Cabinet doesn’t need batteries or WiFi. It just needs you to slide some branches around. Simple, tactile, human. That’s the kind of interaction design that endures long after the tech trends fade.

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Pareto Pot Uses the 80/20 Rule to Give Your Favorite Pens a Better Home

Most creative desks have a cup overflowing with pens, markers, and tools, even though you reach for the same few every day. There is the Muji gel pen for sketches, a couple of render markers you trust, and then about 15 other things you keep just in case. The Pareto Principle says 80 percent of your output comes from 20 percent of your stationery, which feels accurate once you notice how often you dig past everything else.

Pareto Pot is a stationery holder designed around that rule. Designer Liam de la Bedoyere noticed his own reliance on a handful of hero tools and built a pot that prioritizes those while still keeping essential counterparts within reach. It is a small desk object that treats hierarchy as a feature rather than pretending every pen deserves equal billing, using form and compartment size to make your most-used tools easier to grab.

Designer: Liam de la Bedoyere

Sitting down to sketch or render, your main pen and key markers naturally drop into the larger front compartment, while backup colours, fineliners, or highlighters slide into the smaller rear section. Without thinking about it, you end up with a front row of tools you use constantly and a supporting cast that is still close but not fighting for attention every time you reach for something.

The object is made from bent and welded sheet metal, forming a nested, teardrop-like footprint that balances minimalism with clear function. The outer shell wraps around an inner wall to create two compartments in one continuous gesture, so it reads as a single form rather than a cluster of tubes. The result feels industrial and precise but not cold or overdesigned, more like a small sculpture that happens to organize your pens.

The base is wide enough to stay put when you grab a handful of markers, and a cork underside protects the desk and adds grip. The height keeps pens upright and visible without making them wobble or tip when you pull one out in a hurry. It is the kind of object you can slide around a crowded workspace without worrying about tipping or scratching the surface underneath.

A small “80/20” mark on the side acts as a quiet nod to the idea driving the form, not a loud logo. It is a reminder that the pot is not just another cylinder; it is a physical diagram of how most of us actually work, a big space for the few tools that matter most, and a smaller one for everything else.

Pareto Pot is less about storing as many pens as possible and more about making it easier to focus on the ones that pull most of the weight. It does not tell you which tools to love; it just gives them a better spot to live in. For anyone trying to tame a chaotic pen cup without giving up their favourite analog tools, that feels like a quietly smart upgrade.

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Minimalist Phone Takes On Teenage Engineering-inspired Design To Offer Hyper-Functionality

This phone is so minimal it doesn’t even have a name. This brick-ish beauty comes from the mind of Keziah Mendjisky, an industrial design student out of Paris. The idea is simple, how much can you take away from current phones to give you something that feels like a phone and performs like a phone, but doesn’t have any of the distractions? Mendjisky’s attempt at re-envisioning a connectivity device is gorgeously risqué, resulting in something that you’d first think was a calculator.

Grab it, however, and you’ll realize it doesn’t have your calculator’s layout. The numbers are laid out like a phone, starting from the top unlike a calculator (which starts from the bottom), there are volume and playback keys, and two conspicuous buttons marked green and red, which become obvious once you realize they’re for answering or rejecting calls. Everything gets packaged in a design format that would make folks at Braun or Teenage Engineering very happy – the use of white, the employment of tactile surfaces, and just the right amount of fun without making the device look like an unserious toy.

Designer: Keziah Mendjisky

“This concept rethinks what a phone should be in a world of constant distraction. No glass screen. No endless scrolling,” says Mendjisky. One could argue that ‘no glass screen’ might be pushing things a little too far, but the minimal phone he designed with this very constraint still feels ‘cool’. The screen is replaced by a backlit plastic panel with a dot-matrix light-up display – think screen on your Ember thermos or the Mui Board Gen 2.

The top right corner of the display is dedicated to the time and weather. The left, however, is where the main elements are visible, A very tactile scroll wheel lets you quickly jump through functions or contacts, while a green or red button lets you call or disconnect. In the middle, a speaker key lets you activate the loudspeaker mode while on calls, with the speaker unit itself right above the button array.

The rest of the buttons lack a concrete explanation, but it’s easy to infer what they could be for. Numbers dial numbers, obviously, but there’s a T9 keyboard underneath too, presumably for searching contacts or texting. Forward and rewind buttons could possibly hint at voicemail playback, although the phone apparently handles media too. Most buttons are concave, making them reliable to press, although a few critical buttons have an embossed/extruded design, probably hinting at more core functionality.

Phoning is arguably the most important aspect to this minimalist gadget, although Mendjisky’s visuals hint at a few core tools like music playback, navigation, and maybe even an alarm. Plus, given its calculator-esque aesthetic, I’d probably expect a calculator function to be built-in too, but the lack of addition/subtraction/etc buttons does tend to worry me!

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This Silicone Pen Has No Seams, No Clip, and Twists Like Konjac

Most pens announce themselves with metal clips, visible joints, clickers, and branding competing for attention. There’s usually a textured grip zone, a separate barrel, and some kind of mechanism you can see or feel when you deploy the tip. Japanese minimalist objects go the opposite direction, hiding complexity under calm surfaces and letting the act of using them take center stage rather than the object itself announcing its presence.

Twist is a ballpoint pen designed by UO for KACO that hides its mechanism inside a single sleeve of soft silicone. Instead of a separate grip, clip, and twist ring, the body is one continuous mass you hold like chalk. When you twist to extend the tip, the silicone flexes and follows the motion, so the whole form breathes rather than simply exposing a joint or clicking a part.

Designer: Yu Matsuda (UO)

Conventional pens assign jobs to different components, a non-slip clip, a shaped knob for twisting, a hard plastic barrel for structure. Twist folds all of that into the silicone itself, so material, components, and function dissolve into one volume. There is no obvious boundary between grip and body, in line with Japanese minimalism’s habit of hiding seams and making objects feel like they came from a single mold.

The interaction feels quieter than expected. You twist the body and the silicone gives slightly as the inner core rotates, a motion the designers compare to twisting konjac. There is no sharp click or exposed threading, just a smooth, resistant turn and then a tip that quietly appears. It turns a mundane action into a tiny tactile moment without shouting about mechanics or exposing any hardware underneath the skin.

The design team aimed for the directness of holding chalk, where there are no moving parts, only your hand and the line. With Twist, the uniform silicone surface means your fingers do not travel over seams or texture changes, so your brain pays less attention to the object and more to the writing. It becomes the kind of pen you forget you are holding until you notice how unintrusive it has been all afternoon.

Under the silicone is a real mechanism engineered by KACO, a twist-to-extend core driving a 0.5mm gel refill that writes smoothly. The lack of a clip makes it feel more like a desk pen than a pocket tool, but the soft body and light weight mean it slides into bags without catching on anything or scratching objects nearby, which matters when you keep three pens loose in a pouch.

Twist treats minimalism as a reduction of visual and tactile noise, not just an aesthetic of thin lines. It takes a familiar object and strips away every cue that says “mechanism here,” leaving a single silicone stick that quietly transforms when twisted. Most stationery leans on knurls, clips, and cutouts to feel engineered, so that kind of restraint feels surprisingly fresh, like getting a pen that understands the difference between presence and performance.

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This Ceramic Bowl Has Secret Compartments for Pistachio Shells

Eating pistachios or olives usually means improvising a discard situation. Shells end up on napkins, side plates, or scattered across the coffee table, and by the time the bowl is empty, there’s a mess to clean up. Shared snack bowls at parties have the same problem: fresh food mixed with scraps, and everyone reaches in with uncertain hands trying to avoid the pile of pits someone left on the edge.

CALYRA treats that mess as part of the design brief rather than an afterthought. It’s a ceramic food and waste server that combines a main serving space with dedicated discard areas in a single form. The two pieces nest together symmetrically, both during use and when tucked away in a cupboard, so pits and shells have an obvious home from the start instead of wandering around the table.

Designer: Christina Tran

Picture a casual evening with pistachios on the coffee table. CALYRA’s larger basin holds the fresh snacks, while two smaller cavities collect empty shells and pits as you work through the bowl. Instead of juggling an extra plate or folding a napkin into an improvised waste pouch, everything stays within one footprint. When you’re done, you can carry the whole situation to the sink in one trip.

Once the food is gone, the two pieces nest into a compact stack. The cut-out legs and curved profiles lock into a stable shape that’s easy to store in a small cabinet. That symmetry means you can carry it as a single object from the cupboard to the table and back again, even when your hands are already full with wine glasses or a tray of something else that needs attention.

CALYRA’s smooth ceramic surfaces and rounded interiors make it simple to rinse or wipe clean, with no tight corners for residue to hide in. The neutral form and color let it move between different foods and settings, from solo snacks at a desk to shared tapas at dinner. It behaves like regular tableware, just with the added intelligence of a built-in waste plan that most bowls quietly ignore.

The concept focuses on the unglamorous part of eating, the shells, seeds, and pits that usually get handled as an afterthought. By folding that step into the serving piece itself, CALYRA turns a small annoyance into a smoother gesture. It’s the kind of quiet improvement that makes you wonder why most snack bowls still pretend the messy part doesn’t exist, as if ignoring it makes it less of a problem when you’re trying to enjoy pistachios without turning your table into a shell graveyard.

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ILO Lamp Lets Soft Light Wander Between Rooms

Evenings drift from kitchen to dining table to balcony and back, while the nicest lamp stays tethered to a single socket. The small but persistent annoyance of cords, extension leads, and the feeling that lighting never quite follows where people actually end up sitting becomes background noise. Beautiful lamps are static, and that friction quietly shapes how and where you use light, even when it should not.

Arieto Studio’s ILO Lamp is a response to that pattern. The designers started by watching their own routines, noticing how often they moved while the light did not. ILO is an attempt to let light move as naturally as people do, without turning into a tech gadget or a camping lantern, treating the portable lamp as a piece of furniture that happens to be untethered when you need it.

Designer: Hanna Billqvist (Arieto Studio)

The lamp is two elements that live together, a luminous donut that holds the light and a weighted base that stays plugged in. When the donut rests on the base, it behaves like a sculptural table lamp. When lifted, it becomes a compact, cordless light that can travel to the terrace, coffee table, or hallway without trailing cables behind it or requiring a new outlet.

The base is both a stand and an induction charger. When the donut is dropped back onto it, charging starts automatically, no ports or cables to find in the dark. This turns recharging into a background ritual, the same motion you would make when tidying a table at the end of the night, and the lamp is ready again by morning without thinking about it.

The soft, diffused glow from the ring throws gentle light across a table rather than a harsh spotlight. It is meant for calm, ambient illumination, the kind that makes late conversations feel unhurried and lets food or books sit in a pool of warm light without glare. The donut radiates evenly in all directions, so it never casts hard shadows or creates bright spots.

The donut on a balcony rail during a late drink, on a low shelf beside a sofa, or in a hallway where there is no convenient outlet shows how the same object moves between roles without looking like camping gear. It stays firmly in the language of interior objects, simple forms, rich colors, and a glow that feels like it belongs rather than borrowed from a utility drawer.

The contrast between the glossy, cream-colored ring and the solid, colored base makes the lamp read almost like a small sculpture when assembled. The base comes in several tones, burgundy, green, and blue, so it can either disappear into furniture or act as a quiet accent in a neutral room. The proportions are calm and grounded, not trying to impress with complexity.

ILO is less about showing off wireless charging and more about removing the tiny compromises that come with static lamps. It treats light as something that can follow dinners, conversations, and quiet moments, while still looking like a considered object when it comes home to its base. For people who move through their homes rather than settling in one spot all evening, a lamp that can keep up without cables or outlets starts to feel less like a luxury and more like how lighting should have worked all along.

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