Boing Boing » furniture

Carpets now in Minecraft

Rob Beschizza — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:42:41 +0000

You may now get carpet in Minecraft and get Minecraft carpet. Sort of.

Warhol's Brillo Boxes made out of foam and sold as furniture

Mark Frauenfelder — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 20:55:37 +0000

At $425 each, this set of 3 will run you 3 X $425.

(I suspect Warhol wouldn't have created his boxes had he been exposed to this design travesty instead of James Harvey's masterpiece.)

Space Invaders chairs

David Pescovitz — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 17:14:27 +0000

Design firm DoKC Lab created these excellent Space Invaders-inspired chairs. "Game Over" (via Juxtapoz)

Furniture made by pouring molten aluminum over wood

Rob Beschizza — Tue, 22 May 2012 15:01:00 +0000

Hilla Shamia creates beautiful, weird furniture by placing logs inside molds and filling them with molten aluminum: "The negative factor of burnt wood is transformed into aesthetic and emotional value by preservation of the natural form of the tree trunk, within explicit boundaries. The general, squared form intensifies the artificial feeling, and at the same time keeps the memory of the material." [via Design Milk]

Soap Bubble chair on Kickstarter

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 04 May 2012 20:06:09 +0000

Andrew writes, "A new designer chair from Andrew Miller at mSurfaces.com uses soap bubble physics to unlock their unique structural advantages. While architects have used the shape of a soap film to provide canopy, as in the 1972 Olympic Stadium by Frei Otto, the chair will be the first built object to support a human's weight with the form. It is the equal distribution of curvature throughout a soap film that makes it so aesthetically pleasing to the eye. However, this formal quality also redistributes the structural forces. If you could harness this property, you could use lightweight and inexpensive materials instead of steel. Imagine multi-story tents able to support the weight of electrical and plumbing lines, swiftly deployable in the aftermath of natural disaster. This chair will demonstrate the proof of concept towards such real-world load-bearing applications. 3-D printed models and renderings of the chair are now available on their Kickstarter page."

Soap Bubble Chair (Thanks, Andrew!)

Pixelated furniture

Rob Beschizza — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:02:10 +0000

Design Milk offers a roundup of pixelated furniture and home accessories that one may buy, such as this "Do Lo Rez" Ron Arad rug depicting a serious industrial accident in Minecraft.

Folding tables, desks and carts with a tiny footprint

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 21:08:28 +0000

On Core77, Hipstomp profiles Oasis Concepts, a furniture maker that produces flat-folding compact furniture. I'm semi-obsessed with tiny-footprint furniture at the moment, having confronted the reality that we're not likely to get a bigger flat any time soon. I keep thinking that if we could just put in some ambitious convertible Murphy-style furniture in each room, we could get 1.5 rooms' worth of utility from each.

Oasis Concepts' Folding Tables

Zigzag bookcase shows Ikea a thing or two about not shipping air

Rob Beschizza — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 22:14:46 +0000

"REK is a bookcase that grows with your book collection," writes Reinier De Jong Design on its official website. "The more books the bigger the bookcase gets. The zigzag shaped parts slide in and out to accomodate books in the resulting voids. REK will always be full, regardless of the quantity of books. Also the books can be arranged according to their sizes. The narrow spaces are excellent for magazines."

Price is "on request", unfortunately, which suggests I'll be sticking with my cheapo Billies for the time being.

REK bookcase [via Jessamyn West]

HOWTO make your own skateboard truck lazy-susan table

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 21:59:34 +0000

Inspired by the skateboard-truck lazy-susan table I blogged last year, Instructables user Wilgubeast has produced a HOWTO for replicating it for about $70, excluding the glass: "Think of the possibilities: Play board games where nobody has to look at the board upside-down. Bring the remote within reach without getting up from the couch. Epic tea parties."

Skateboard Table

Geek Chic's insane and beautiful gaming tables

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 17:13:24 +0000

Seen at New York Comic-Con, which I'm presently attending, the fabulous, ultra-deluxe gaming tables of Geek Chic, which sport a series of nested, pull-out play-surfaces, drawers, a rail-system for suspending drinks/bins/additional surfaces, erasable acrylic-coated surfaces, and so forth. Shown here is the "Sultan," their top-of-the-range item, but they have a variety of options for smaller homes and budgets. I like their slogan: "Suck it, Swiss Army Knife."

The Sultan [geekchichq.com]

One-of-a-kind desk hides a pipe organ and fluidic computer

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 15:21:23 +0000

Housefish has a writeup on Kagen Schaefer's pipe-organ desk, which hides in its drawers a pipe organ that doubles as a fluidic computer, and which has stolen my heart:

At first glance, it’s a relatively ordinary desk, albeit very finely made out of exceptional wood, and with an unusual number of small drawers. Open a drawer though, and there’s a surprise- each drawer operates a wooden pipe organ tube on the back. Opening different drawers plays different notes and lets you play songs. If I stopped right there, a wooden pipe organ desk would already rank among the most novel and impressive pieces of wooden furniture either of us has seen.
But there’s another secret. Inside the desk is a fluidic computer, operated entirely by the air pressure pulses created by opening and closing the drawers. This has been programmed so that playing a predetermined sequence of notes opens a secret compartment somewhere on the desk. It’s also reprogrammable, so you can set it to open when you play the theme to Star Wars, or whatever you want. And in case it wasn’t clear, this is made entirely of wood; there are no electronics of any kind. It is literally something that could have been built using technology available 500 years ago.

Kagen Schaefer Pipe Organ Desk | Housefish (via Crib Candy)

Transparent soft furniture

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 11:51:16 +0000

For Milan design week, furniture company Poltrona Frau exhibited some of its designs covered in transparent PVC without any fill, so that the structural elements were visible. I like the look of this, though it does remind me of the transparent toilets and TVs sold for use in prisons.

Transparent Furniture by Poltrona Frau (via Crib Candy)