Tag Archives: stool

Steel Pipe Stool That Never Uses a Single Weld or Screw

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I’ve seen a lot of stool designs that call themselves minimal and still hide a dozen fasteners under the seat. Yuval Meron’s Pipe Stool actually earns the word, and once you look closely at how the pieces meet each other, you start to appreciate it as a piece of design rather than just a fabrication trick.

The whole object reads as a single ribbon of steel that got folded, twisted, and locked into place. Look at where the seat cylinder meets the legs and you’ll notice small teardrop shaped holes and hook cutouts, cut with a laser before the metal was ever bent. Those cutouts aren’t decoration. They’re the joinery. One piece hooks through another and the tension of the bent steel holds everything tight, so the stool clicks together almost like a puzzle piece finding its slot. It’s a quiet bit of engineering that never announces itself, because from a few feet away it just looks like clean negative space.

Designer: Yuval Meron

The silhouette itself is what actually pulls me in. A rolled cylinder seat sits on top of two angled legs that splay out from a single central column, giving the whole thing a stance closer to a sawhorse or a gymnast’s pommel horse than a traditional four legged stool. That tripod like base means the stool never wobbles, even though it looks like it’s balancing on almost nothing. There’s something satisfying about a design that looks precarious and turns out to be the opposite.

Meron shows the Pipe Stool in a few finishes, and the variations tell you a lot about what this piece is trying to be. There’s a raw galvanized version, left with the mottled, slightly industrial sheen of unfinished steel, screws and seams visible on purpose rather than hidden away. Then there are the powder coated versions in navy and a deep red, which flatten the metal into a single confident color and make the stool feel more like a finished furniture object than a prototype. Seeing all three side by side, the raw metal, the navy, the red, makes clear this isn’t a one off art piece. It’s a system that can dress up or stay stripped down depending on where it needs to live.

The seat itself is the one part of the stool that isn’t steel. A padded cylindrical bolster, upholstered in a nubby woven fabric that echoes the tube shape underneath it, gets seated into the folded metal collar at the top. In the green version the fabric has almost a felted, sweater like texture, which is a smart contrast against all that cold, cut steel below it. It’s the kind of detail that makes you want to actually touch the thing before you sit on it, and honestly, that tension between soft seat and hard structure might be the most successful design decision in the whole piece.

What I appreciate most is that none of this needed extra parts to make it feel resolved. No visible bolts holding the seat to the base, no bracket doing quiet unglamorous work underneath. The hook and slot joints do the structural job, the powder coat or galvanized finish does the aesthetic job, and the upholstered bolster does the comfort job. Three problems, three simple solutions, no overlap.

I also like that Meron didn’t try to disguise the process. You can see exactly where the pipe was cut, exactly where it folds, exactly how one leg locks into the next. A lot of designers would sand that story away and pretend the object arrived whole. This one lets you read the making of it right there on the surface, which turns a stool into something closer to a diagram of its own construction.

It’s still a student project, and it may never make it past a handful of prototypes in a handful of colors. But it’s a genuinely good looking object regardless of where it ends up, one that manages to look sculptural and structural at the same time, and that’s a harder balance to strike than people give it credit for.

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This Chinese Stool Hides 2 Storage Bins Right Under Your Seat

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When I sit in a really comfortable chair or couch, there are times when it’s genuinely hard to get up and grab something I need. Half the time, I wish every seat came with built-in storage, so that before I even sit down, everything I need is already within arm’s reach. I’d just have to reach down or reach to the side instead of hauling myself up off the cushions.

This “turtle stool” from China might just be the chair of my dreams, as long as I don’t mind sitting close to the floor. It’s a molded seat mounted on top of a low crate frame built from aluminum extrusions, basically a hybrid of a stool and a storage bin that can also roll around the room whenever you need it to. The stool comes from designer Qingshan, whose work centers on modular, industrial-style furniture built almost entirely from aluminum extrusion systems.

Designer: Qingshan

At a glance, the turtle stool has a smooth, rounded, molded seat sitting atop a low, boxy frame, and that shape is exactly why it earned its nickname. The rounded top paired with the low, shell-like base gives the whole thing a squat, turtle-like silhouette, and it’s a design detail that makes the stool instantly recognizable and a little bit charming.

Instead of the wood, plastic, or steel tubing you’d typically find on a stool like this, the base is built entirely out of aluminum extrusions, the same modular aluminum bars used in workbenches, shelving units, and even 3D printer frames. That choice gives the stool a raw, industrial look, and it also means the frame can be engineered and reinforced without welding, since extrusion pieces bolt together using standardized connectors.

The best part, though, is what’s hiding inside that base: two separate storage bins built right into the frame. Whatever you need close at hand, tools, craft supplies, remote controls, or just general junk, can live inside the stool itself, tucked out of sight but always within reach. On top of that, the whole thing rolls on casters, so you can scoot from one side of the room to the other without ever actually standing up.

Looking at the stool, it’s probably too low and too compact to catch on in the American or European markets, where seating tends to sit higher off the ground. But in Asia, and in China specifically, a stool like this makes a lot of sense, since low seating is a much more familiar and accepted part of everyday furniture there. This piece also fits neatly into Qingshan’s broader body of work, which leans heavily on modular, industrial-feeling furniture like height-adjustable side tables and monitor risers.

It’s worth comparing the turtle stool to what’s already available in the U.S. market, and the closest match is probably IKEA’s RÅSKOG rolling utility cart, a wildly popular three-tier metal cart that people use for everything from kitchen storage to craft supplies to bathroom organization. IKEA’s version is polished, mass-produced, and instantly recognizable, but it’s built purely for storage and movement, not for sitting. On the flip side, mechanics and garage enthusiasts in the U.S. already use rolling shop stools with built-in storage trays, made by brands like Sunex, for the exact same reason Qingshan built this piece: so you don’t have to get up to grab a tool. The turtle stool essentially splits the difference between these two ideas, combining IKEA-style rolling storage with the seated comfort of a garage stool, wrapped in a much more playful, design-forward shell.

At the end of the day, the turtle stool is a clever little solution to a problem most of us don’t even realize we have until we’re stuck sitting on the couch, five feet away from the TV remote. It won’t replace your living room sofa, and it’s probably not headed for a mass American release anytime soon, but it’s a fun example of how a simple idea, comfort plus storage plus mobility, can turn into a genuinely useful piece of furniture. Sometimes the best designs really are the odd ones.

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A Step Stool That Actually Belongs in Your Entryway

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Tying your shoes in the entryway shouldn’t feel like a balance test, but it usually does. You hop on one foot, grip the doorframe or a console table that wasn’t built for that kind of abuse, and hope you don’t tip over before the laces are done. It is a tiny, daily inconvenience that most American homes have quietly accepted, because the entryway is rarely treated as a space worth designing for. Stephen Chan decided to fix that with a step stool built from Douglas Fir, one with a single offset block positioned at exactly the right height to rest a foot while you knot your laces, and it is well-crafted enough that hiding it in a closet would feel like a waste.

That combination is rarer than it should be. Most step stools look utilitarian by design, the kind of thing you tuck behind a door and drag out only when necessary. Chan’s version refuses that fate. The composition reads as a cluster of rectangular volumes grouped together, with one shorter block offset to one side to create a natural foot ledge. It is immediately functional without a label or instruction, and the geometry is clean enough that it reads as sculpture before it reads as utility.

Designer: Stephen Chan

The material choice matters here. Douglas Fir is a Pacific Northwest species, pale and straight-grained, and Chan finishes it in hardwax oil rather than a thick lacquer, so the surface stays matte and raw-looking rather than polished and precious. The wood still feels like wood, with the grain visible and the texture honest. At 300 by 300 by 480 millimeters, the proportions are heavy but not oversized, solid enough to trust with real weight, compact enough to fit in a New York apartment entry without dominating it.

American design right now leans into curves and soft materials, bouclé everything, rounded edges that signal comfort and approachability. Chan goes the other direction entirely. The stool is blocky and angular, closer in spirit to a Donald Judd sculpture than anything you would find at a furniture chain. That is not a criticism. The right-angle joinery is precise and the overall form has the kind of quiet confidence that does not need softening to work in a home. It earns attention without demanding it.

There is a specific context this piece fits into that Chan actually illustrates in his own photos, where he is pictured lacing up a pair of Timberland boots on it. That single image places the stool in a very familiar scene: the entryway of a house in a state with real winters, where work boots and rain boots live by the door out of necessity. Douglas Fir itself grows in that same region, so the material and the use case are quietly connected in a way that feels considered rather than coincidental.

The stool does not try to multitask. It is not a side table or a plant stand or a storage unit with a hidden compartment. It has one job and it does that job with more precision than furniture at twice the price usually offers. That kind of restraint is genuinely rare in a market that rewards versatility over specificity, where every piece of furniture is expected to justify its footprint by doing three things at once. Sometimes the better answer is an object that solves one unglamorous problem extremely well and looks good doing it.

Nobody has ever really solved the entryway stool in a way that made you want to keep it visible. Chan’s version makes the case that the reason most of them get tucked away is not the category, it is the execution. When the craftsmanship is there and the geometry is intentional, a step stool can actually belong in the room rather than hiding from it. Chan’s work is on Instagram at @stephen_____chan. If you follow design accounts, it is worth a look.

The post A Step Stool That Actually Belongs in Your Entryway first appeared on Yanko Design.

A Student Designed Stools That Glow When Strangers Connect

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I spend a lot of time in cities. Airports, subway stations, coffee shop benches, those weird little plazas that exist between office buildings where nobody actually looks at each other. And every single time, I notice the same thing: we’ve gotten very good at designing spaces for bodies, and very bad at designing them for people.

That’s the gap Bahar Aryana is trying to close with Spore, a student project that recently earned recognition in the interaction design space, and one I genuinely haven’t stopped thinking about since I came across it.

Designer: Bahar Aryana

Spore is, on the surface, a seating network. A set of stool-lights, technically. But what makes it compelling isn’t the form, it’s the behavior. Each stool is embedded with pressure and capacitive touch sensors that map the way a person sits. When someone settles in, the stool begins to glow. It reads your posture, your weight distribution, your physical presence, and it responds with light. Then, if someone sits at a nearby Spore stool, something unexpected happens: they synchronize. The lighting across both stools begins to pulse together, a slow warm amber glow that ties two strangers into a shared sensory experience without either of them saying a word.

The concept is lifted directly from mycelium, the underground fungal network that connects trees in a forest, allowing them to share nutrients and information across vast distances. It’s a design metaphor that’s been floating around the cultural conversation for a while now, thanks in part to documentaries and the general rise of nature-as-inspiration thinking. But Aryana doesn’t just borrow the metaphor. She uses it structurally. The idea that two separate, self-contained beings can be quietly linked through an invisible network, made visible only through light, is exactly how mycelium works. The translation feels earned.

Spore’s real bet is on non-verbal communication, and that’s where the idea earns its keep. We’re so conditioned to think that connection requires effort, that it needs an introduction or a screen or at least eye contact. Spore suggests something quieter. That two people can share a moment, acknowledge each other’s existence, and feel slightly less alone in the middle of a city, all because a stool noticed they were both sitting down. It doesn’t force anything. It just opens a door.

That restraint is where good interaction design lives, and it’s harder to achieve than it looks. Plenty of “smart” furniture concepts collapse under the weight of their own features, too many sensors, too much data, too much demand on the user to understand what’s happening. Spore sidesteps all of that by keeping the interaction instinctive. You sit. The light changes. You notice the person next to you is glowing the same color. That’s it. The simplicity is the point.

I’ll also say this: the timing matters. Urban loneliness has become one of those issues that shows up in public health conversations now, which is a sign of how serious it’s gotten. Cities are denser than ever, but connection in them often feels more transactional and less organic. Spore doesn’t pretend to solve that in any sweeping way. But it does offer a model for how designed environments could at least stop making things worse, how furniture could be neutral rather than indifferent, sensory rather than sterile.

Aryana is a student, which means Spore is still a concept. It hasn’t been tested at scale, and the jump from prototype to real public infrastructure is not a small one. But some of the most important design conversations start exactly here, with a single idea that reframes what a familiar object is capable of. A stool is a stool until someone decides it could be something more. Spore makes the case that public furniture doesn’t have to be passive, that the spaces between strangers don’t have to feel so empty, and that maybe the forest has been doing something right all along.

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

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

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

Designer: Yuna Yamashiro

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

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

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

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

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The Stool Made From 100% Recycled Plastic That Looks Like Art

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If you’ve ever tossed a plastic bottle cap into the recycling bin and wondered where it actually ends up, the Bit Stool might be the most satisfying answer the design world has offered in a while. Created by Neetica Pande for Normann Copenhagen, it’s a piece of furniture that reframes the entire conversation around sustainable design. Not because it comes with a manifesto, but because it’s genuinely, undeniably beautiful.

The design brief was built around a deceptively simple tension: familiar forms, surprising materials. Pande took 100% recycled household and industrial LDPE, the kind of low-density polyethylene that shows up in your everyday plastic packaging and bottle caps, and compressed it into dense, speckled cylinders and discs. The result looks, at first glance, like granite or terrazzo. The texture is almost painterly. Get close enough and you see the whole story: a surface made up of color fragments, each one a former piece of something that would otherwise have been thrown away.

Designer: Neetica Pande

What the Bit range gets right, architecturally speaking, is restraint. The three variants, the Bit Stool, Bit Stool Stack, and Bit Stool Cone, all work with stacked geometric volumes: cylinders, discs, cones widening toward the base. The silhouettes feel ancient, like something lifted from a Roman column or a mid-century Scandinavian furniture catalogue. That familiarity is intentional. Pande, working under the mentorship of Simon Legald and Saskia Huebner alongside collaborator Marie Bal-Fontaine, leaned into shapes the eye already trusts, then let the material do the unexpected.

And that material does a lot of heavy lifting, literally. The Bit Stool handles temperatures from -10°C to +50°C, making it equally at home on a sun-drenched outdoor terrace and inside a living room. It’s also genuinely multifunctional in a way that doesn’t feel forced. Use it as a seat. Park a vase on top. Slide it next to the sofa as a side table, or push it over when an unexpected dinner guest shows up. That kind of quiet adaptability is something I appreciate more and more in furniture right now, especially as living spaces keep shrinking and every object in the room has to justify its footprint.

The color palette is where the collection really hits its stride. The range comes in black, white, red, yellow, blue, green, and a confetti-speckled multicolor that leans directly into the recycled identity instead of downplaying it. These aren’t muted, apologetic tones. They’re bold and deliberate, treating sustainability as something to celebrate rather than something to compensate for. That shift in framing matters more than it might seem. Sustainable design has spent a long time wrapped in neutral linens and earthy tones, as though beauty were somehow incompatible with responsibility. The Bit Stool proves otherwise.

The campaign photography makes a compelling argument too. Seeing the stools scattered across tiled floors like oversized chess pieces, or sitting quietly on a wooden outdoor deck with open countryside behind them, or propping up flower arrangements in a well-lit interior, you get a clear sense that these are objects designed to be looked at just as much as used. The sculptural confidence the collection carries earns its place in any room.

Pande never tried to hide what the Bit Stool is made of, and that honesty is the crux of why it works. The speckled surface isn’t a flaw to be corrected or a quirk to be tolerated. It’s the entire aesthetic argument. Every fragment of compressed plastic embedded in those cylinders is evidence of the process, proof that something discarded became something worth keeping. Making recycled material feel genuinely desirable, without dressing it up as something it isn’t, is a much harder design challenge than it appears. This collection handles it quietly and confidently.

Normann Copenhagen has long had a reputation for functional objects that also happen to be beautifully considered. The Bit Stool sits well within that lineage, while also feeling like something new. The conversation around sustainable design doesn’t have to be earnest or beige. Sometimes it gets to be speckled, sculptural, and exactly what your terrace was missing.

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Pompom Stool Made From Recycled Aluminum Is Green Design Done Right

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Sustainable design has a branding problem. Not an ethics problem, not a materials problem, but a branding problem. For years, the conversation around circular materials and responsible production has been wrapped in language that feels like a lecture. Worthy, yes. Exciting, rarely. So when a stool shows up at Alcova during Milan Design Week looking like a bouquet of pompoms crowning a cluster of dreamy pastel cylinders, it stops you mid-stride. That stool is the Alice Stool by Studio LoopLoop, and it’s making a very quiet but very pointed argument.

Founded in 2022 by Odin Visser and Charles Gateau, Studio LoopLoop is a Dutch practice that operates somewhere between science lab and design studio. Their approach is hands-on and deliberately self-sufficient, developing their own processes rather than outsourcing to industrial systems they’d rather move away from. For Alice, that methodology produced something that looks almost nothing like what we typically picture when someone says “sustainable furniture.”

Designer: Studio LoopLoop

The base of the stool is made from 100% recycled aluminium, specifically Hydro 100R extrusions, and coloured using a plant-based anodising technique the studio developed in-house. The result is a range of subtle colour gradients that shift from soft sage to deep plum to warm yellow, achieved through controlled dyeing rather than chemical baths heavy with petrochemical inputs. The seat is upholstered with Savian by Bio-Fluff, a plant-based faux fur hand-dyed with NIG natural pigments. The combination is tactile in a way that feels almost irrational for a piece of furniture. You want to touch it. You probably want to sit on it and not get up.

And that’s exactly the point. Studio LoopLoop titled their Alcova presentation “Alice Atomicus,” a nod to both Lewis Carroll’s dreamlike world and the idea of material elements rearranged into something new and entirely unexpected. Sustainability, they’re saying, doesn’t have to arrive in a brown paper wrapper with a guilt trip attached. It can be playful. It can be seductive. It can be soft and sculptural and genuinely desirable.

I think this matters more than it might seem. The design industry has spent years making the case that circular materials can be high-quality, and that case has largely been won. But the emotional argument is trickier. If sustainable design feels like an obligation rather than a pleasure, it will always occupy a niche, admired from a distance but rarely chosen with enthusiasm. The Alice Stool feels like a genuine attempt to close that gap, to make the responsible choice the one you actually want because it’s beautiful, not just because it’s correct.

The use of Savian is worth pausing on. Bio-Fluff’s plant-based fur made its breakthrough in fashion through collaborations with Collina Strada, Martine Rose, and Louis Vuitton, finding a foothold in a luxury market that was already starting to rethink its relationship with animal materials. Moving into furniture feels like a natural extension, and the Alice Stool is one of the clearest demonstrations of Savian’s material potential outside of a clothing rack. Against cool metal cylinders, the fur reads as something almost otherworldly. It’s plush in a way that synthetic faux fur typically isn’t, and the hand-dyed variation in the seat means no two stools look exactly alike.

That detail matters to me personally. Mass production has its place, but there’s a real cultural hunger right now for objects that carry the trace of human hands. The Alice Stool has that quality in abundance. The graduated aluminium tones, the slight unpredictability of natural dye, the tactile generosity of the seat, together they suggest something made with attention rather than efficiency as the primary value.

Studio LoopLoop is a young studio, only four years old, but they’re working with a clarity of vision that feels well ahead of their timeline. The Alice Stool isn’t a concept piece hedged with caveats. It’s a fully formed object that asks a simple question: why should doing the right thing look boring? The answer, apparently, is that it doesn’t have to.

The post Pompom Stool Made From Recycled Aluminum Is Green Design Done Right first appeared on Yanko Design.

Your Home’s Newest Resident Is a Tiny Blue Butler

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Furniture, as a category, is not usually meant to make you smile. It holds things, supports things, stores things. Function dictates form, and form gets built around the assumption that your chair or side table should have as little personality as possible. That is the design orthodoxy, at least. The longstanding idea that objects in service of a purpose should quietly disappear into the background, noticed only when they are missing. Liam de la Bedoyere disagrees. And Mini Monsieur is his very persuasive argument.

This concept piece, developed as a personal project at boredeye.design, rethinks the stool and side table as something altogether more alive. Mini Monsieur is a squat, rounded body rendered in an irresistible cobalt blue, with two arms posed differently: one curled against its torso, the other raised high and balancing a flat circular tray. Two swirling embossed brows sit just below the flat crown of its head, giving it the air of a patient, quietly distinguished little servant. If you have ever thought your furniture should have more opinions, this piece has exactly enough.

Designer: Liam de la Bedoyere (boredeye.design)

The butler concept is where the design gets genuinely clever. De la Bedoyere is not just making something cute, though it absolutely is that. The character premise actually explains the function. A butler exists to be present without being intrusive. It waits. It holds things for you. It serves without asking why. Translating that relationship into furniture means the form earns its personality rather than wearing it purely as decoration. The raised tray arm is not a quirky detail; it is a job description made physical.

Functionally, Mini Monsieur works as both a stool and a side table, which makes it surprisingly practical for something that looks like it wandered off a Pixar set. The tray holds a glass, a phone, a book, whatever needs to be within arm’s reach without claiming additional floor space. A scaled render with a seated figure confirms it holds its own proportionally, compact without being precious, sized to actual human use rather than just optimized to photograph beautifully. You could genuinely use this every day.

Where the design earns its real credibility is in the restraint around how far the character goes. No mouth. No eyes. Just those two curled brows and the asymmetrical arms. De la Bedoyere stops exactly where he should, giving Mini Monsieur enough personality to register as a character without crossing into novelty-item territory. That balance is harder to strike than it looks, and it is the reason this concept holds its own in conversation with serious design references. The Dieter Rams book staged on the tray in the renders is not accidental. It is a knowing nod to the idea that rigorous design intent and genuine warmth do not have to occupy separate spaces.

The all-over cobalt blue is also worth pausing on. Monochromatic execution is one of those choices that either elevates a form completely or exposes every weakness in it. Here, it does the former. The single-color treatment lets the silhouette read with full clarity, makes the curves feel more deliberate, and keeps the tray-as-arm reading as part of one cohesive body rather than a tacked-on accessory. One render includes a lone orange version surrounded by a field of blue, the kind of detail that signals a designer already thinking in colorways, editions, and how pieces behave as a family. That level of forward thinking is encouraging.

Whether Mini Monsieur moves from concept to production remains the open question, and frankly it is the only thing standing between this design and a very good home. My genuine hope is that it does, because the market for furniture that takes itself seriously while still being joyful is more underserved than we tend to acknowledge. Not everything needs to be a neutral linen cube or a Scandinavian plank. Sometimes a room benefits from something with a recognizable presence, a little dignity, and one arm already raised to take your drink. Mini Monsieur is already at its post, ready and waiting.

The post Your Home’s Newest Resident Is a Tiny Blue Butler first appeared on Yanko Design.

A Stool With Six Legs Just Made Four Feel Outdated

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The humble stool has barely changed in centuries. Four legs, a flat seat, done. It exists in every cafe, classroom, kitchen island, and co-working space on the planet, reliably doing its one job and nothing else. So when a designer comes along and asks what happens if you add just one more leg, the answer should probably be “nothing interesting.” And yet here we are, talking about SQOOL.

SQOOL is a 2025 personal project by Liam de la Bedoyere of Bored Eye Design, a UK-based independent studio that describes itself as creating work that’s anything but boring. At first glance, the stool reads almost like a creature. Six curved legs splayed outward with little rounded feet, a compact circular seat on top, and that one rogue arm reaching upward and curling into a hook. It looks like a cheerful yellow squid that decided to get into the furniture business, and I mean that entirely as a compliment. The photographs make it look alive. Depending on the angle, it shifts between dog, bug, and some friendly unnamed species you’d encounter in an animated film.

Designer: Liam de la Bedoyere (Bored Eye Design)

The concept is deceptively simple. Five legs provide complete stability, the same geometric logic you’d get from a traditional four-legged stool, just with an added sense of security and visual rhythm. The sixth leg is the interesting one. Freed from any load-bearing duty, it becomes something else entirely: a handle for carrying the stool, a hook for a bag or jacket, a rest for your coffee cup, a cradle for a book. The images show it doing all of these things casually, as if the stool has always known it could.

What makes SQOOL feel genuinely considered rather than just whimsical is how that extra function was thought through. The sixth arm doesn’t just stick out awkwardly. It curves deliberately, creating a shape that invites the hand to reach for it. People apparently do this instinctively, discovering its utility through touch rather than any printed instruction. That kind of design, where the object teaches you how to use it without saying a word, is harder to pull off than it looks.

The stacking detail is also worth noting. Getting six legs to nest cleanly on top of each other is a real engineering puzzle, and de la Bedoyere solved it by shaping each leg with enough taper and spacing to allow the stools to slide into each other gracefully. Seen stacked in a column, they look spectacular. Like a sculpture you’d walk past in a gallery and immediately photograph. Which means SQOOL is doing double duty even when no one is sitting on it.

The color choices lean fully into the stool’s playful register. The saturated yellow is hard to miss, and a soft lavender variant appears in some renders, equally confident. These aren’t accent tones chosen to recede politely into a neutral interior. They’re chosen to assert presence. SQOOL isn’t trying to disappear into a corner. It wants to be part of the room, part of the conversation, maybe even part of your grid. That’s not a criticism at all. Personality in furniture is genuinely underrated, and design objects that commit fully to their own character tend to age better than the ones trying to be neutral.

Bored Eye Design’s portfolio shows a consistent interest in objects that are curious and approachable, things that reward a second look and feel good to handle. SQOOL fits neatly into that sensibility. It’s playful without being infantile, practical without being dull, and memorable without leaning on novelty for novelty’s sake. The name alone, a blend of “stool” and something else entirely, already tells you what kind of designer de la Bedoyere is.

The question with any concept project is always whether it would survive production. I think SQOOL could. The logic holds up. The form has already been thought through with stackability in mind, which is usually where playful concepts fall apart. A stool this considered, this expressive, and this genuinely useful deserves more than a render portfolio. It deserves a production run.

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Screw-inspired Stool Numbered Like a Sneaker Drop: Only 150 Made

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There’s a certain kind of object that can’t quite decide what it is, and not in a bad way. Furniture has increasingly strayed into collectible territory, and collectibles have crept into living rooms posing as furniture. The result is a growing category of designed objects that live somewhere between a chair and a limited-edition release, serious about craft but refreshingly light about everything else.

Carpet Company, the Baltimore brand known for carving out its own irreverent corner of the design world, leans into that tension with the S-TOOL, its first piece of furniture. The name makes no effort to hide the attitude, and the official list of potential uses runs from stool and ottoman all the way to footrest, ornament, chew toy, and, with admirable candor, trash.

Designer: Carpet Company

The form is remarkably direct. A 12-by-12-by-12-inch cube of 100% fiberglass, cast in a single unbroken gloss color, sits on four chunky legs that taper down to blunt, faceted points. The top surface carries a screw-head relief in each corner, molded flush into the fiberglass in the same color as the piece, which reads immediately as hardware but behaves purely as ornament.

The screw motif carries through to the legs, shaped like Philips screwdrivers that slot into the screw-head relief of another S-TOOL. It’s a small but loaded gesture, nodding to the DIY impulse of the design process without pretending to be handmade. Carpet describes it as hardware that speaks to how things get built, balanced against the glossy, almost candy-like finish to keep the whole concept from becoming too earnest.

The S-TOOL is a limited release, with only 150 units spread across 30 colors, five of each. Every piece carries a metal plaque screwed into the underside, detailing the release and edition, which gives the stool some of the same collectible gravity you’d expect from a numbered print or a signed sneaker. At 15 pounds, it’s substantial enough to feel like something, and that’s rather the point.

The packaging reinforces the whole thing. The box carries the same list of purposes, a column of color-coded screw illustrations previewing the full range, and a cartoon hippo mascot that’s equal parts absurd and charming. Carpet has always been deliberately playful, and the S-TOOL packaging reads like the product brief itself, a small manifesto folded around a cube of brightly colored fiberglass.

What makes the S-TOOL interesting is how much effort went into something that officially disclaims all responsibility. Carpet spent considerable time on proportional analysis to give the elementary form a sense of sophistication it doesn’t advertise, and it shows in how quietly resolved the piece sits. It’s furniture that doesn’t mind being treated as trash, but it’s built carefully enough that you probably won’t.

The post Screw-inspired Stool Numbered Like a Sneaker Drop: Only 150 Made first appeared on Yanko Design.