Furniture

April 12, 2016April 12, 2016

Don’t Call Me Murphy

The problem with most beds is that they do one thing: support your unconscious body for 6-13 hours a night depending on your employment situation. For the other 18-11 hours, mono-purpose beds just laze around the house, occupying a ton of space that could otherwise be used to good effect. And though we are unabashed fans of murphy beds, which can quickly transform a bed area into a something else area, they are not the only type of multipurpose bed. We ran across a couple different European bed manufacturers that pack a ton of utility in the same footprint that would otherwise be used for a bed alone.

The Space Up bed (above) by France’s Parisot is a bed system with a closet’s worth of storage under its double-sized mattress. To access the storage, the mattress and its frame cantilever up, made possible by hydraulic pistons. The sides of the bed also features bookshelves, adding to its utility. With a low price point and no frills materials the Space Up seems mostly geared toward younger audiences.

If you want something more high end, check out Italy’s Dielle Modus who takes the Space Up idea to 11. While they make a variety of bed and storage systems, the ones that caught our eye are their room systems featuring storage either under or above the bed. The storage volumes for both are considerably larger than Space Up. The below-bed systems work much like Space Up with a hydraulic lift for the mattress. The under-bed volume is big enough for a hanging rack storage; it’s also big enough to warrant stairs to access the bed. Those stairs double as drawers of course.

The models featuring overhead storage are more practical than they might initially seem. The overhead cabinets have hanging racks that easily pivot down. There is captain bed type drawers underneath and tall cabinets at the head. The sleeping nook can also be closed off with curtains to fend off light and, we suppose, insects.

March 11, 2016

This Thing Turns Spaces Into Homes

What differentiates a space from a home? We’re not referring to the smell of baked bread or the pencil marks on the door sill marking your child’s growth. We’re talking about the most basic constituents that push a space over the threshold into being a home. As far as we see it, there are three things. First, there must be a structure to protect you from the elements. But sheds and warehouses and myriad other spaces have structures, so that’s not all you need. It must have a bathroom. Yes, some dwellings have outhouses or bathrooms down the hall, but those are more likely to be considered dorms, boarding houses or yurts. Finally, houses need kitchens because, well, people need to eat. Rotterdam design studio Kraaijvanger recently created Hub, a modular unit that quickly and easily turns a space into a home. From Dezeen:

Each module contains a kitchen, bathroom and toilet, as well as facilities including heating, a sound system and a Wi-Fi connection – providing residents with almost everything they need to live comfortably.

The 15 sq m boxes are designed to transform any space with electricity, water and sewage, such as a vacant office, into a livable home (we suspect the first two requirements are far easier to handle than the last one).

Kraaijvangerto also created BedHub, which is a modular bedroom. Both modules act as room partitions, chopping up open spaces into discrete rooms.

One of the most edited things you can do is use the stuff you already have. Hub is an innovative way of putting to use unused spaces that are not otherwise set up for habitation. Now just tell that to the building inspector.

Photo credit: Ronald Tilleman.

March 1, 2016March 1, 2016

Awesome Furniture Company Makes Awesome Furniture

As we saw with the Yatno line, lightweight, compact and affordable furniture–the kind ideal for small space living–need not be disposable, poorly designed junk. We can now add furniture maker Greycork to this list. The startup is making a line of furniture that features elegant designs, super simple assembly, lightweight structures and affordable prices. And unlike Yatno, Greycork is US-based and taking orders.

On their website, Greycork is offering a sofa, chaise, bookshelf, coffee table and side table. All of items can be assembled without tools and are made of high quality materials such ash wood and powder coated steel. And despite their good looks, the prices are genuinely reasonable. You can buy all five pieces individually, with prices ranging from $125 for the side table to $700 for the sofa. Or you can get all five for $1500. The furniture is made in the US and flatpacked shipped to your door.

While we appreciate what stores like IKEA do provide for small space dwellers, it’s been said that the cost of throwing their furniture away and re-buying it is often cheaper than the cost of moving it. What companies like Yatno and now Greycork are doing is creating adaptable, lightweight and attractive furniture that’s worth holding onto.

Via Ippinka blog

February 11, 2016

Video: The Year of Magical Furniture

When we cover interesting compact spaces on this site, we usually list their usable area, expressed in square feet or meters. We are pretty hardwired to draw a correlation between a space’s area and functionality. Even when we take pains to list the functionality first, it’s always couched in the “wow, you can do that in a small space?” But what if we decoupled space and functionality altogether? You see, listing area is a conventional approach to understanding space. It’s something easy to wrap our heads around and measure with a stick. But area often misrepresents the gestalt–i.e. the sum total of architecture, furniture, embedded technology and the other UX elements that can help a space transcend its physical dimensions. This talk by Hasier Larrea places special emphasis on the role of furniture to determine how a space performs.

His thesis is that architecture has barely changed in the last 2K years. We keep making static spaces, single function rooms filled with “space killers”–things like beds that lay waste to a space’s functionality the moment after they’re used. He proposes that we augment spaces with transforming elements–ones that are effortless and magical–to create spaces that are alive around the clock.

Larrea knows a thing or two about this subject. The MIT Media Lab alum was part of that school’s CityHome project, which created a high tech furniture module that endow small spaces with tons of functionality. He is now the CEO of MorphLab, a startup that is out to make robotic, open API furniture modules to kill the space killers that not only doom a space’s action potential, but also create a dearth of affordable housing in cities across the globe. He and his team are trying to create a future where our homes and other spaces magically change form to meet our needs.

February 5, 2016September 21, 2016

Furniture for the Ultralight Set

A great deal of micro housing is filled with furniture from the Afterthought School of Design. Micro housing is great for folks whose existences are highly mobile and/or those who are committed to keeping their financial overhead low; as such, investing in high design, high cost and high mass furniture often takes a backseat to low cost, lightweight or easily moved/disposed furniture. Dutch designer Joey Dogge has created a minimalist furniture system that challenges this trend. Dogge’s Yatno line is compact, lightweight, multifunctional, easy-to-move, affordable and beautiful, creating a vision of what small space furniture can look like.

The Yatno collection centers around two main structures: the Yatno Satu and the Yatno Dua. The Satu has open shelving and can be configured to have a desk, a lounge chair or cot. The Dua has a clever stepped drawer system (called the “Laci” and can be ordered a la carte like all the pieces), which acts as stairs used to access upper storage. There is also a sliding cabinet on the Dua that shares a rail that acts as a hanging clothes rack. All of the furniture is freestanding and can be assembled by hand, relying only on wing nuts for fasteners.

The whole system is pretty gorgeous and was designed to fit in a space as small as 50 sq ft. While to overall design seems pretty well sorted out, our big question mark is the cot, which does not look particularly comfortable. Dogge, as model, gets the Oscar for man relaxing reading a book in his promo video. We imaging with a little beefier frame, larger mattress and small headboard, this could be easily improved. Dogge has a full catalog available online showing various customizations for the systems. A recent blast by the company says they are entering their final phase of product development. Visit the Yatno site for more info.

September 29, 2015

Check Out These High-Tech, Transforming, Carbon Fiber Shelves

Carbon fiber is the material of choice when engineers and designers need high strength without added volume and weight–perfect for things like bikes, wheelchairs, high performance cars, aerospace parts, etc. But aside from a few novelty items, carbon fiber hasn’t been a mainstay in furniture design. The reason is simple: carbon fiber is pretty expensive, difficult to manufacture and most furniture doesn’t need to be particularly lightweight, so metal and lumber derived materials are the go-tos for furniture construction. But Japanese design house Nendo’s new Nest shelving unit is presenting a compelling reason why carbon fiber might be incorporated into modern furniture design.

The Nest shelves expand from 25” to 51”. The vertical sheets are made of 3.7mm carbon fiber and the horizontal ones are made of a honeycomb material sandwiched by carbon fiber sheets. The whole assembly is clad with a thin larch veneer so it still has a somewhat traditional look. This construction allows Nendo to make their shelves super thin yet very strong. As such, when the shelves are nested on top of one another, it’s tough to tell there are additional panels under the top ones, thus maintaining a lithe, modern aesthetic. And because of carbon fiber’s rigidity, the shelves, when extended, make no compromise in strength.

While the combination of high strength and low weight and volume are not necessarily that important for things like sofas and built-in furniture–things that don’t move or do that much–items like the Nest shelves can benefit greatly from carbon fiber construction. You could make other items such as chairs that are super slim and strong and store compactly or an ultra thin large table that folds in on itself–furthering the argument for applying high technology to the sometimes technology-resistant world of furniture design.

Via Dezeen

August 4, 2015August 4, 2015

Bleeding Edge Furniture Technology

While there’s a certain novelty about space-saving, transforming furniture–dining rooms that tuck into floors, automated, disappearing bedrooms and so on–its impact on architecture can be real and profound. It might double or triple the utility of a given room, leading to diminished real estate needs, leading to less sprawl, leading to less driving, less waste, smaller carbon footprints and a shot of mitigating the profound damage humans have done to the planet (sorry, but it’s true). It’s an impact big enough to warrant big brains and focus, which is exactly what furniture upstart RockPaperRobot is all about. RPR was founded and is run by Jessica Banks, who holds a PhD in robotics from MIT, a pedigree that shows up in RPR’s new Ollie line of transforming furniture.

Previously, RPR had focused mostly on designing and producing high end furniture that, through creative engineering, appeared to defy the laws of physics–tables that seemed to levitate or rest on a pinhead. These pieces also defied most people’s furniture budgets. While they continue to produce these premium products, Banks wanted to make furniture that was more accessible functionally and financially to more people, which is how Ollie was born.

“We saw a number of trends such as urbanization and the desire to live life with less stuff and more experiences,” Banks told me about the Ollie line’s inspiration. She also saw how the phenomenon of FOMO [fear of missing out] could apply to the objects in our lives. “Most furniture is like, “If I buy this, I can’t do this,’” she said. For example, if I have this full-sized dining table, I can’t have open space to do yoga. “We asked ‘Why should furniture prevent us from doing what we want to do?’”

The Ollie line includes a table, stool and chair, all of which effortlessly transforms from full-sized furniture into super slim storing proportions, giving rooms double and triple functionality. The furniture is both lightweight and sturdy (a rare combination I’ve found). Aesthetically, I would call it industrial chic. The customizable slats are easily swapped to match a room’s decorative needs.

Beside the obvious residential applications, Banks told me that they have been discussing using the furniture in commercial spaces in order to optimize for traffic patterns. For example, a coffee shop with a ton of foot traffic in the morning could deploy Ollie tables in the middle of the day for loitering freelancers (the author knows of which he speaks).

I asked Banks if her robotics training helped in designing the collection. “Definitely,” she replied. “The tables are more like a transmission than tables. They’re highly engineered with 60 moving parts and 300 total parts. We had to make everything work together and calculate for forces.”

RPR is currently readying the tables and chairs ready for production and says they will be taking orders in three months for the chairs and six for the tables (they will also do custom manufactured pieces anytime you want).

April 28, 2015

Yesterday’s Future of Modular Interior Design

This site has featured a number of modular, everything-included interior units–from MIT’s CityHome to Urban Capital’s Cubitat to Clei’s Elastic Living. The concept makes a ton of sense: plug one of these units into a clear space and have all the furnishings, kitchen and plumbing fixtures, storage–everything basically–ready to roll for habitation. The ability to mass produce them would make them doubly attractive to a developer looking to streamline construction. Though aforementioned examples make it seem like this idea is a recent one, such is not the case. Way-ahead-of-his-time industrial designer Joe Colombo made his Total Furnishing Unit almost 45 years ago.

The unit includes a kitchen, bathroom, two beds, storage, a television and more. It was designed to adapt to multiple room layouts and also to its user’s changing habits–moving the modules around would shift the function of the space. In many ways, Colombo’s design bests the contemporary examples as it was designed to be configurable to a variety of different room shapes.

The unit, so far as we know, never went beyond exhibition purposes. But add a new coat of paint and an LCD monitor and the unit would look completely modern.

Via Rudy/Godinez Tumblr and Lloyd Alter/Treehugger

March 31, 2015

5 Pieces of Weird Transforming Furniture

Transforming furniture can be extremely useful in one’s quest to do more with less. It has the ability to make a room do double or triple duty, allowing you to live in a space much smaller than you might have suspected. But it’s not safe to assume that all transforming design is created equally. Some of it is downright weird, redundant or kinda useless. Here are a few examples of furniture that works overtime, doing jobs no one needs done:

The Sensei Chair by Claudio Sibille

What’s weird: When you face these chairs down, they make a low coffee table. But I would think the times you really need a low coffee table and extra surfaces is when you have guests over–a time when you also need extra chairs.

Clapperboard Series of Shelves from Elsa

What’s weird: The shelves of these sleek cabinets conveniently stow away when not in use. But what happens to the stuff that they once held? It’s put on the floor? On another shelf? On the table? Me no understand.

Interchangeable Picnic Table and Garden Bench

What’s weird: Several readers have passed this clever design on to me and I’ve contemplated writing about it in a non-weird context. But something about it doesn’t quite add up. Yes, a bench and picnic table are sufficiently discrete pieces of furniture, but I don’t know if they’re that different as to justify the complexity this piece entails–adding hinges and movable parts has to make the thing more prone to breaking. A picnic table can be used as a bench. In fact, when you sit with your back to the table, it can even have back support. Oh, and the picnic table supports four people.

Sofa Pool Table

Back in college I used to play quite a bit of pool (or billiards is you prefer). I can say with reasonable confidence that this is probably the last table I would have wanted to play on. Besides its tiny size, there’s a huge lip at the sofa’s back, making some shots difficult. And the odds of the pool-table surface having a slate underneath (what gives most tables their solidity) is highly unlikely. Also, the sofa is pretty ugly.

Range/Sofa Thingy by Someone

If you’ve ever been torn whether to have a cooktop or a boxy, uncomfortable-looking chair in your living room, you may no longer have to decide. This transforming range/lounge chair does it all with a simple roll of a chair. I suspect however few people are so torn, making this contraption the answer to a question never asked.

March 11, 2015March 11, 2015

New Company Offers Custom, On-Demand Furniture

One of the more difficult aspects of furnishing a small house or apartment is finding properly proportioned furniture. A good deal of what’s out there is designed for girthsome American homes: big tables, deep desks, huge hutches and so on. For example, when my wife and I were furnishing our home, it was tough to find a very shallow, medium-width desk designed for a laptop and nothing else. We ended up ordering a custom desk, but the end-product was both expensive and because it was a handmade one-off, it ended up being not quite what we wanted/expected. A new Kickstarter project called PARSONAL by design studio Arrister is trying to sidestep the expenses and perils of one-off furniture manufacturing by creating on-demand, custom furniture.

It’s probably more apt to call PARSONAL “semi-custom” as you choose from one of their basic designs, which at this point includes tables, desks, shelves and various stands. But from the basic design you can use PARSONAL’s web-based “Configurator” software and customize the size of the piece, shelf configuration (when applicable) and the finish of the tops and trim.

PARSONAL’s pieces are attractive in a nondescript, lots-of-right-angles sorta way (this is actually a compliment). Make Magazine says of PARSONAL’s aesthetic, “The simplicity of the design makes it ideal for their first offering as it simplifies both the software and fabrication considerations.” The designs would fit in easily to a variety of modern interiors. All the furniture is made of solid wood sourced near Arrister’s Tennessee homebase, so this is actually stuff you might consider holding on to. And prices are decent. Their big ticket item is a dining table that comes with a $650 pledge–pretty reasonable considering you can tweak to your specifications.

The company told us that they plan to expand their catalog into more complex furniture in the future and once production is ramped up, they expect turnaround to be about three weeks from ordering to the furniture’s flatpack delivery. Check out their Kickstarter campaign page for more info.