So your Blandito® may not be the seat to offer your aged auntie when she drops by for tea and scones, but as a cosy crash mat for the multifunctional small-space lifestyle of the hip young urban creative with a penchant for modern Italian design? Furniture of merit, indeed.

I believe the title says it all. Blandito® by Oradaria Design of Italy, is described as a “transformable pad for lazy living” – and I think we can all get behind that concept, no?

Cosy as a sleeping bag or one of those appalling slankets but with, you know, much more padding and much less of the nerdy monk look. Stuffy as a floor pillow, but with its own smooth moves – transformative! Yet, furniture-ish in a couch-inspired way, but without all the stiff bits that keep you from slouching in comfort.

Yeah, well, the pictures say it all.

More pictures below, thanks to the recent mad flush of renewed Blandito love on Pinterest (beloved home of wishful thinking and pretty/weird things).

Oh, wait – first, here’s the design concept video for your viewing pleasure. It’s a fun kind of a claymation thing – something along the lines of what Gumby and Pokey might come up with, if Gumby and Pokey were into furniture design (assuming they still exist, somewhere in the television re-run universe?)… No mind, just watch it.

Must have!
As soon as Blandito comes onto the market, that is…

Blandito is in limited production – sizes small, medium and large – but their website and Behance profile both say they’re moving towards large-scale production, which does give us hope for getting our grubby paws on this bendy-twisty-morphable lazy pad sometime before the end of the millenium.
Sigh.
Things take time.

Photographs: Luca Nelli for Oradaria Design

Stack up those glossy magazines you can’t bear to throw out, buckle them down with a pillow on a pale Nordic-ish birch wood base, and voila! you’ve got a dandy designer footstool, or extra seating for a party…

More than mere designer furniture, the Hockenheimer stool (by German design firm NJUStudio) is a personal objet d’art that makes a statement about who you are and your individual style:

National Geographic?

Martha Stewart Living?

Or will you show off your treasured Rolling Stone back issues?

Heck, you can even show off your lifetime subscription to the Wall Street Journal, if that’s your style!

The Hockenheimer stool comes with a stand of birch wood handmade in a youth workshop in Bavaria, custom-made leather straps with buckles and rivets added by hand, and a unique hand-crafted cotton/polyester pillow to top it off.

The wood base comes in two sizes: Magazine style 305mm x 250mm x 70mm (approx. 12″ x 9.8″ x 2.75″); or Newspaper style 415mm x 305mm x 70mm (approx. 16.3″ x 12″ x 2.75″).

Available at Connox with prices starting at € 128.50 (VAT tax included) plus shipping from its home in Germany.

Why pay big bucks for the same casual shoes you see in every park, schoolyard, gym, or dorm, when you can strut in custom kicks? And why toss out those tired old hightops, when they’ve still got good life left in them?

Give ‘em new life and express your creativity, with a custom design job!

If you can peel-and-stick, you can do Sneakart stickers. Or go for the full sheet patterns… there are about a kabillion designs to choose from, and you can mix and match to create the look of trendy (and expensive) hand-decorated sneakers.

Totally waterproof, these sneaker skins stand up to regular use for a couple of months — or you can peel them off and make a change, any time you like.

Is graphic design your gift?

You can even upload your own artwork to the Sneakart site, to make truly one-of-a-kind footwear stickers. But that’s not all — “Creative design deserves to be rewarded,” they say. So you can choose to keep your designs to yourself, or submit your art to the shop.

If it’s accepted for the design Gallery, each time someone buys your design to customize their shoes, Sneakart will credit your account with 10% of the sale price. You can cash out your royalties payments via Paypal or roll it over to get more Sneakart stuff for yourself.

Puma Sneaker Art Contest

And here’s a sneaker art contest that’s running right now, for another chance to make your artistic talents pay off — or at least to win a free pair of customized Baskets:

Sneakart is running a competition with in conjunction with PUMATALK to find the freshest new designs around. Design exactly what you want to see on a sneaker and then you can make it real with sneakskin. All good artwork will be accepted to the Sneakart library and will earn royalties on any sales made. The winner will be chosen by PUMATALK and sneakart and will receive a pair of baskets exclusively customized with sneakskin in their design.

Your custom sneaker design can be created with any software or hand drawn, as long as you use the templates provided. Check out the sneakart tutorial for more information.

This innovative shelving, Zyklus by creosa interior, is all about the play of light in Klimt-inspired spirals. At least, that’s more or less what Architectural Digest said back in May when they raved on about this designer piece. Whatever the inspiration, it’s a crisp modern interpretation of the Art Nouveau aesthetic that takes furniture into the realm of sculpture… Nice!

Stark white or subtle colours for the lacquered metal spiral, with cross members of coordinating MDF or natural wood. The unit is approximately 58″ x 50″ (15″ deep) and holds up to 700 CDs, or 70 bottles, or whatever else you might fancy. So, one piece of furniture is both art and multi-purpose storage and display unit — how often can you say that?

There’s a lot to be said for the sleek European style kitchen designs — the “clean aesthetic” that favours flat surfaces, neutral colours, and a pristine countertop free of all clutter — but it can be hard to pull off in an open-plan home.

Real life has a way of leaving its traces… despite all our good intentions!

Stilll, there are tips and tricks we can swipe from the top kitchen designers to help get a bit more of that clean open minimalist look into a real family home’s real working kitchen.

Trend Ideas is showing a fabulous Leuschke kitchen, for example, that started out as the typical closed-off kitchen of the 1980s. The architect opened out the kitchen to the rest of the house — a much better fit for today’s family tends to live, now that Mom isn’t stuck in the kitchen like a character out of Happy Days — but still found some practical ways to keep the kitchen mess out of sight. The layout relies on a few cleverly placed partitions and frosted glass sliding doors to conceal the pantry and such.

One unusual feature is a simple frosted-glass panel on the long kitchen island — just enough to keep the sink area out of the sight-line of seated guests, but not high enough or solid enough to visually break up the wide-open spaces.

My own decorating taste runs more to the cosy-boho-vintage eclectic, to be honest. I’m not sure that I could personally enjoy an afternoon of baking in the midst of so much white laminate and so little colour, but that’s a small quibble… and it’s easy enough to introduce a shot of colour where it counts, without losing the look.

The key here, I think, is that even those of us with widely differing tastes can learn a lot — and find a lot of excellent ideas to swipe and adapt for use in other kitchen decor styles — by browsing photos of designer kitchens that do showcase the “clean aesthetic”: Ernestmeda and ALNO would be a couple of good starting points.

I’ve written elsewhere about Orange22, but it’s time to revisit the studio for Carbon22 — a limited-edition line of experimental furniture set to launch at Art Basel 2008.

Inspired by flight technology, Carbon22 includes a desk, stool, end table and cocktail table — all “blacker than black” and made entirely of carbon fiber.

This furniture has been tested in a wind tunnel.
Really.

See the unmistakeable influence of Dario Antonioni‘s life-long love affair with aerospace engineering — a field in which he’s been formally trained.
This is one fascinating designer /entrepreneur…

He calls himself a “maker of things” — a purposefully open-ended description, as Orange22 designs and fabricates both mass-market and limited-edition objects and furniture, brand-defining retail environments, residential interiors and design concepts licensed for mass production. In every case, Antonioni fuses technology, art and design, with the overarching intent to revolutionize the way we live.

Technorati Tags: furniture, design

Domingos Tótora is a Brazilian designer with a remarkable feeling for organic flow, for the line that simply feels right to the eye — sustainable, organic, renewable, like Life itself. His products were exhibited at Maison & Objet in Paris and currently in stores and galleries around the world. This showcase is at www.do-not-touch.com, a new venture of Zoe Melo.

TOUCH collaborates with emerging designers in creating handmade products, rather than mass-produced blending aesthetics, sustainability and social responsibility. What matters most is the lasting effect of the product and its process.

In short, Touch seeks to “do business differently” and reduce the environmental footprint of home decor and furniture products. Other designers shown at present include Estúdio Manus, La Feliz, and Mana.

Clearly, the Italian design firm Kartell has something special going on with see-through furniture — it keeps turning up in my favourite home decor sites, all sparkling and spooky.

Just recently, Will of Furniture Fashion wrote about the disturbingly beautiful Kartell Louis Ghost chair, and he explains it all thus:

Kartell is probably the only company that has a specific division that researches raw materials like polypropylene, polystyrene and polyethylene for use in not only the world market, but their own dining chairs and other furniture lines.

The piece that caught my eye in Kartell’s current product line, however, is this baroque table lamp designed by Ferruccio Laviani.

Both ornate and streamlined, the Bourgie lamp is traditional in form but achingly modern in its execution, with all that poly-transparency to catch the light beams and sparkle like an earth-bound chandelier…

Sure, all this transparent furniture and accessories has a disorienting effect — it gives me a strange sense of double-vision, as if my depth perception is just a bit off — but yet, the attraction is there… I think I could even convince myself that it’s intensely practical, too. After all, the lamp can be assembled at any one of three different heights, then adjusted to another height later on if your lighting needs change… so… that’s very practical, right?

In this season of boots and giving, some intnernational celebrities have climbed on board with Art & Sole, UGG Australia’s annual auction in support of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

It’s fascinating to see actors and musicians explore their visual-artistic sides… even more so when the canvas on which they’re painting a message of hope is a pair of suede Classic UGG Mini Boots.

Beyond question, the hands-down prize is this henna-inspired design by Liv Tyler.

Cindy Crawford‘s done a ducks-egg-blue flowered pair that’s worth a look, too — but with an auction price that’s standing at $1700 as I write, with three days left to go, I’m afraid that looking is all I’m going to do! And Miley Cyrus’s rainbow boots have a top bid of $2400 — that’s a lot of moola to help the sick kids.

Celebs who have pitched in a paintbrush for the cause include Eva Longoria, Martha Stewart, Matthew McConaughey, John Travolta, the cast of Friday Night Lights and Las Vegas, Whoopi Goldberg, Sharon Stone, and Ashlee and Jessica Simpson among others.

[via SheFinds]

Etsy.com is my number-one source for hand-crafted inspiration… and I thought you might like to see a few of my current craft crushes.

This display will change almost every day as I discover and add new favourites by Etsy artists from all over the world — so you might want to bookmark this page, to check back in from time to time… Also, if for any reason you can’t see the pretty pictures here, you can jump right over to my etsy page to see it all.

If British designer Lee Broom’s gothic-curvy Neo Neon art furniture isn’t inspired by a haunted mansion, I’ll eat a toad.

Chairs, cabinets, console tables and delightfully baroque vanity mirrors take on a ghost-like glow when they’re highlighted with neon lights.

I’m especially taken with the High Voltage Vanity mirror, 92cm x 141 cm (approx. 36¼” x 55½”) framed in black or white lacquer and lit with pink or white neon.

Where best to display such a mirror… perhaps in a minimalist foyer, or at the end of a long hallway where it can command the attention that’s due?

Lee Broom launched the debut line of neon art-furniture last month at the Brick Lane Gallery during the London Design Festival (which, seriously, I’d have raffled off my mother to be able to attend). Each of the Neo Neon pieces is built to order and will have a limited release of 25 worldwide, individually branded and numbered for authenticity.

[via StyleHive]

Technorati Tags: neon, furniture, designer

It almost breaks my heart that this clever emoticon T-shirt doesn’t exist yet!

Have a Day is a submission by a guy called Elbeardo to the on-going T-shirt design contest over at Threadless.com — where they give away something like $2000 in cash and prizes to 4-6 lucky winners every month.

Isn’t this a great design?
So simple, and yet so… simple.

The emoticon smiley face would be a blank circle, so you can draw on the face that best expresses the kind of day you’d like others to experience — and a blank white space lets you pick your own adjective. With a washable marker, you can change your mind about your design if your day happens to take a turn for the better or worse, part way through…

Anyone can send in a design for a chance to win, or vote on other people’s submitted designs — joining the street team is free and lets you earn points that can be cashed in to support your Threadless T-shirt habit.

And I’ll warn you now, surfing on the Threadless site gets habit-forming.

I was lurking for a while and finally grabbed a free account of my own at the end of August.

See, I’ve got an idea brewing for a submission of my own… (and aren’t you just so curious to know what it might be? Too bad, it’s not ready yet!) So far I’ve just been enjoying the fun of voting for my favourite shirt designs and leaving an occasional comment for the Threadless artists and wannabees like me.