Romantic Furniture

It is February 14, and you know what we are talking about. Forget functionality, forget aesthetics, remember the season!

Studio 65: Bocca Lip Sofa

A tad provacative in design, but definitely looks comfortable!

Modular Wood Furniture: Craft Your Own Custom Designs

Do-it-yourself craft projects sometimes end in disaster. With this curious wood construction set, however, you can always start afresh – every modular wood piece is held together, amazingly enough, with string. The system is entirely tension-based – wooden parts are pulled together to make a stable whole.

Of course, it gets better: the pieces do not just go together in one way to make a single piece of furniture – these so-called Extensions are designed to create at least three particular distinct design objects including a bench, table and set of bookshelves.

Because string is at the heart of the design it is easy to undo any given structure and make something different. While the designers have a series of suggestions there is naturally a good deal of room for invention as well.

A variant on the core project, there as an lamp set as well that works as a stand-alone floor light or can be made into a lighting extension to other pieces from the same modular ilk.

IKEA Gone Insane: Funny & Strange Hacked Furniture Set

Between do-it-yourself types and people who like to assemble things without reading the instructions, there is a good deal of ‘IKEA hacking’ going on these takes – making something new, different, strange and/or personal from the standardized, uniform, modular parts that come when you buy an IKEA furniture kit or set.

Wiyono Sutjipto has taken this practice another step, crafting entirely new, offbeat and utterly un-IKEA abstract forms from the bits and pieces that are bought as parts of various kits at the store. If the odd shapes, offbeat angles and questionable functionality were not enough, he has also added a set of colored legs to each piece. Along with the labeling of them ala IKEA standards, this is no-doubt a hat-tip to the strange way in which IKEA gives names to each and every object they sell.

Along similar yet simultaneously opposite lines, the same designer has created a set of ‘homeless furniture’ pieces. Cobbled together from found tables, chairs and other once-used and now-discarded designs, these are intended to raise questions about the way we so readily discard things that could have a second life as strange, new and unique household objects.