If architects can construct entire apartment buildings from used shipping containers and Thai monks can build a temple from discarded beer bottles then why can’t an artist create furniture from old shopping carts?
That perhaps is what self-described cross-media visual designer Ramón Coronado asked when he spent 12 weeks at his Los Angeles home creating his Mercado Negro collection.
Spot Cool Stuff loves the high design simplicity. Which is exactly why we like the Swedese Libri bookshelf system.
And we aren’t the only fans of these bookshelves—the Swedese Libri won the Best New Product Design award at the 2008 Stockholm Furniture Fair.
What’s so cool about the Swedese Libri?
You may have heard the term flashpacking, the act of traveling in the spirit of a backpacker but with the budget of one more monied. Well, from the Netherlands comes what might be the ultimate in flashcamping—a portable, wood-burning spa.
The Dutchtub is a personal hot-springs-to-go. If you have a tub-sized patch of flat ground, wood and 200 gallons (750 liters) worth of water or snow you can have your own spa virtually anywhere.
What do you get when Luke Skywalker’s Landspeeder in the first Star Wars movie and Marty McFly’s futuristic hoverboard in Back To The Future 2 are your inspiration for designing a chair?
You get The Lounger from the British company Hoverit.
Designers are finally starting to come around to the idea that a work cubicle can be more than a desk and three bland walls. A cubicle needn’t be the drab workplace that imprisoned the protagonists of Office Space and Dilbert. To wit: the Workflow “inverted office cubicle” from the multidisciplinary Swedish design studio o4i.
Imagine a network of interactive multimedia beds—located in hotels and airport lounges around the world—that would automatically know your favorite music, your travel schedule and your television preferences.
Creating that network is the ambitious goal of Yoo-Pod Ltd. and their Somnus-Neu project, named after the ancient Roman god of sleep but billed as “the future of beds.” And with all of these beds’ high tech features it is easy to see why.
Numerous sofas look like they are one piece of furniture while, in fact, dividing into several pieces. Now there’s a sofa that is the opposite.
