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?
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.
As a school kid we used to play with rubber bands when bored in class. We like to imagine the Italian designer who thought of the Elastico Bookcase playing with rubber bands too and then getting a simple, inspired, idea:
Design—and fashion—are circular in nature. Trends come, and go, and then come again.
So it is with the Murphy Bed, that bane of 1970s studio apartments. After a 30 year hiatus we are in the midst of a revival of beds that fold down from a wall. Except now a Murphy Bed is as likely to fold down from a ceiling or emerge from the back of a desk. And instead of the ugly wall monstrosity that reveals a lumpy mattress, today’s Murphy Beds are sleek, elegant and comfortable.
The difference between modern Murphy Beds and those of yesteryear has lead at least one website to call for these hidden beds to be called something else. “Flying beds” it suggests. Whatever moniker you want to use for them, here are some designs that caught Spot Cool Stuff’s eye:
When buying a shelf system you usually have to choose between good design and portability. Swiss designer Thut Möbel developed a shelf unit with both qualities. Collapsed the unit is a mere 24 cm (9.5″) tall. Expanded you set the distance between the six shelves at 33 cm (13″) or 28 cm (11″). Available in an untreated, black or natural wood finish.
You wouldn’t design a bookshelf around the latest best sellers or some fad self help books. But you might if the books were the most important ever written. That’s what design firm Mike and Maaike did when they form fitted a piece of reclaimed redwood to display humanity’s most holy literary works: The Bhagavad Gita, The Bible, The Qur’an, Confucius’ The Analects, The Tao Te Ching, Discourses of the Buddha, and The Torah. Together they make for 3,700 years of wisdom, brought together harmoniously on this beautiful bookshelf.
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There are two cool things about the wallpaper from Dutch designer Jonas Samson:
First, when it is turned off it looks like normal wallpaper — stylish and sophisticated, with flowing floral patterns, but otherwise normal.
Second, this is the sort of wallpaper you can predicate with the phrase “when it is turned off.” When it is turned on light appears from behind the wallpaper as if by magic. The sensation it gives to a room is truly transforming. See more photos below:
