Manolo for the Home

Radar won’t detect THIS chair from Blu Dot! Its faceted surfaces give it a very low radar signature because it can radiate almost all of the radar energy away from the receiver. Okay, maybe I’m making all of this up, but I can’t help it if my brain says B-2 when I look at this particular piece of furniture.

2Modern says: “Powder-coated steel ships flat and folds along laser-cut lines to create a dynamic and comfortable chair. As skinny as a supermodel, yet far more sturdy.”

I don’t necessarily know that I want my furniture to be as skinny as a supermodel. Furniture from my local discount store is as skinny as a supermodel and that isn’t good. I wouldn’t mind, however, if my furniture was as study as a F-117 Nighthawk because that’s pretty dang sturdy. Unlike the Nighthawk, the Real Good chair is available in ivory, aqua, and red.

Oh, MetroSofa, you minx! Temptress! Or is that tempter? I mean, really now, is an only seating shop traditionally male or female? It doesn’t matter. Your antique-modern aesthetic makes me want to light all of the furniture in my house on fire just so I have an excuse to buy more.

Seriously — classic styles merge with hip fabrics in a perfect blend of old and new. They start with recyclable or antique wood frames that would otherwise end up in a landfill and work their magic to make them beautiful again, choosing “paints, fabrics, cushions and finishes with green production and manufacturing in mind.” Yep, green as in eco-friendly so you can feel good about your chair…unless you had to torch all your existing chairs to get it.

Plus, if you don’t like any of the chairs you see below, you can custom design your own!

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This is just too cool not to share, even though there’s a goodly chance you’ve already seen it on Metafilter or Gizmodo on in the NYT, where the story originated.

Now, I love puzzles — even when I can’t solve the razzafrackin things — and if I had the money, I’d spend millions of dollars to have architectural designer Eric Clough hide all manner of brain-twisters in my house, just like he did for Steven B. Klinsky and Maureen Sherry.

…some of that furniture and some of those walls conceal secrets — messages, games and treasures — that make up a Rube Goldberg maze of systems and contraptions…The apartment even comes with its own book, part of which is a fictional narrative that recalls “The Da Vinci Code”…It has its own soundtrack, too, with contributions by Kate Fenner, a young Canadian singer and songwriter…

It started during the design process, when Klinsky asked that a poem he had written for and about his family be lodged in a wall somewhere and Sherry suggested hiding it, “like a time capsule.” That sent Clough into a frenzy in which he immersed himself in code books and cipher books, and then reached out to the sort of furniture makers who specialize in hidden closets.

All of that was tied into gizmos Mr. Clough, Ms. Bensko and others in their office hid in the apartment — without telling the clients — in a way that is almost too complicated to explain. Designing and producing the apartment’s hidden features, however, including its book and music, took four years, said Mr. Clough, who absorbed much of the cost in terms of his own billable hours, and relied on the generosity of more than 40 friends and artisans who became captivated by the project.

[The mystery] remained largely unnoticed by its inhabitants for quite some time after they moved in, in May of 2006. Then one night four months later, Cavan Klinsky, who is now 11, had a friend over. The boy was lying on the floor in Cavan’s bedroom, staring at dozens of letters that had been cut into the radiator grille. They seemed random — FDYDQ, for example. But all of a sudden the friend leapt up with a shriek, Ms. Sherry said, having realized that they were actually a cipher (a Caesar Shift cipher, to be precise), and that Cavan’s name was the first word.

Once the family received their first real clue via mail, they were dogged about solving it. That’s actually the part of this interesting tale that bothers me most — all of that work went into making this unique apartment, and the mystery was solved something like two weeks later if the article is to be believed.

Give me a puzzle house that lasts a decade! Why, oh, why don’t I have all the money in the world with which to build it?

United States Patent #3149880 is for “Disposable Furniture.” It’s an interesting idea, and one that I feel has been thoroughly embraced by people in the U.S., if not quite intentionally. I like to walk around my neighborhood in all sorts of weather, and it’s an unusual day indeed that doesn’t involve my stopping to inspect some piece of discarded furniture. There isn’t all that much in my house that came out of someone’s trash, but there are a few things. I enjoy refinishing tables, you see, and the curb is a wonderful place to find blank slates upon which to work my magic.

So what do I mean by disposable? This passage from Yet Another Blog about Money sums it up nicely:

IKEA makes sense if you’re willing to recognize that the furniture items you buy aren’t going to become heirlooms–and indeed, might not even survive your next move. They are, in a sense, disposable. If they break or get scratched, you won’t be happy about it, but you won’t lose sleep over it, either. And when you finally decide that you are sick of a particular piece of furniture, it will probably have a used resale value of somewhere between $5 and $25, which, depending on your personal finances, you might not even bother with reselling.

I have one of the chairs in the image above, complete with a nubbly off-white cushion that attracts cat hair like some kind of magical magnet. I tell you this: It’s flimsy. Yes, I’m probably the third or fourth owner of the chair (thanks, Kristina!). Yes, there’s a bit that’s glued because there was a “fyorgen” or whatever it is Ikea calls those oddly shaped screws they give you with your flat packs. However, that doesn’t change the fact that the chair is simply not made to last.

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I always thought beanbag chairs were kind of stupid. Yes, they’re comfortable when they’re not the really cheap kind from Wal*Mart, but they’re always just a tad too small for the grownup human being. I generally view beanbags as being something you stick in a kid’s room until they’re old enough to know better.

Here’s me, eating my words as I contemplate cozying up to The Beard on this six foot beanbag from Studio OneUp. They still look like something you might blunder into in a stereotypical “mantuary,” but at least they’re big enough for two.

I was all set to write about moon gardens, but it’s already just shy of 11 p.m. and I have to get up at 5:30 a.m. so there goes that idea. A post about moon gardens is forthcoming, and to stimulate your appetite, here’s a description: “Designed to be enjoyed from dusk until the coming of the darkness, these gardens serve as a perfect complement to silvery moonlight, mild summer nights, and the spirit of rejuvenation.” Uh…okay, maybe not. Basically, moon gardens contain a mix of flowers and plants that look badass at night.

Until I muster up the energy to compose a missive about ‘em–look for it on Friday morning–please enjoy some pictures of freaky chairs…like this meat chair, for instance:

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Please don’t confuse this with the five things I can’t live without. It’s totally, totally different! For one thing, I already have some of the things listed below. It’s just that my particular versions aren’t quite as nice. And some of the things are totally impractical, pointless, and even silly!

It is the height of ridiculousness and something I could probably make myself, if necessary. We’ve talked about ceramic cats in the past, but this one is just a tad different. What’s stopping me from snapping it right up is the price tag. The Rosenau Castle cat (part of Nymphenburg’s Big Five porcelain trophy series) costs a cool $929. Ouch.

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Clear and colored plastics don’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon if all these house and home rags I read every month are any indication. There are the various Ghost chairs designed by Phillippe Starck, and then there’s the polyhedron Alchemia chairs I mentioned a while back.

Here’s another, again designed by Starck:

The Mademoiselle armchair claims to combine two (or is it four?) aesthetic qualities: “solidity and space, materiality and transparency.” I like the fact that it comes in oodles of different colors and prints.

This is Starck’s chair in what is presumably its natural habitat:

I don’t particularly like the way it looks like it’s hovering in space, a la Dominar Rygel XVI’s floaty chair. Maybe it’s something about the wall the chair is up against, but the legs just seem to disappear. I suppose that’s the “space,” but I’m not feeling the “solidity.”

What with papercraft looking to be the next big thing — you know, now that knitting is mainstream cool again — why not try your hand at something a tad more useful than the average origami swan? Foldschool is a teeny collection of furniture for kids that parents can construct using the cardboard boxen everyone seems to keep stashed in the basement…just in case.

There’s even a manifesto:

Mass culture is run by superficiality and ecological absurdity. Foldschool supports craftsmanship as a face-to-face approach to design and brings together product and user the closest possible. The mindset of foldschool is to restore design to one of its original missions: to provide a product at an affordable price through a smart manufacturing process.

The downloadable patterns can be printed out with any printer, and you may already have the required tools: cutter, ruler, cutting mat, spray adhesive, needle, glue, masking tape, and folding tool. According to the site, the resultant furniture is stable enough to be used by an adult…though the pieces themselves are small, so consider scaling up. I can’t vouch for the scalability of the designs, but it’s worth a shot, right?

Who’s Jo Meester? He’s a designer from the Netherlands and co-founder of the Meesters & Van der Park Design Studio. I enjoy his work because of its amazing diversity — instead of sticking to one discipline, he moves from one to another with great skill. He explores woodworking before moving on to crochet before taking up a needle to create art from cast off pieces of wool. Not everything is particularly functional, but all of it is fun.

These err on the side of functionality, though the name — Ornamental Inheritance Vessels — speaks to me of urns and ashes. I think I’d set them up somewhere instead of, say, filling them with filberts.

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