I’ve featured my fair share of unobtainable designs here on Ectomo, loudly preaching the gospel of DIY approaches to the prohibitively expensive (or simply non-existent) designs of which I’m so fond. Sadly, not everyone has access to the tools, materials, and workspace required to give form to their dream creations. That time is over my friends.
A Parisian art collective calling themselves Le Cartonnistes utilize cardboard to create all manner of furniture, ranging from simple shelves to beds to entire room sets. While it may seem a questionable load-bearing source material, the technique used to form the structures that will eventually become furniture insures the stability of the creation — to a reasonable point of course.
The technique requires a bit of trial and error as well as accuracy within millimeters, but the oaths with which you’ll purple the air as you make mistakes (and learn valuable lessons) are all worth it when the TV box covered in a sheet being used as a coffee table actually becomes a coffee table, and a damn fine one at that.
I highly encourage each and every one of you to try your hand at this. The only limits to your swank boudoir now are the bounds of your own imagination.
The struggle, as a young, poetically destitute city-dweller, to decorate the microscopic studio apartments we inhabit in a manner befitting the forward-thinking futurists we know ourselves to be is, at times, a hopeless quest. Dreaming of sleek, modular cubes or soft round-cornered bits and bobs amidst a tangle of thrifted, “borrowed”, mis-matched furnishings is an all too common practice for we that wish beyond our meager means. While I offer no respite from seemingly perennial poverty, I do bring new scenery for your interior dreamscape.
Would not something such as this piece, named the Eclosion, fit perfectly in a cramped, cyber-bohemian apartment? Would not your friends award you plaudits in recognition of your superior design sense and knack for procuring the obscure? Indeed they would, were this actually for sale. Sadly, this piece by Olivier Gregoire, like so many other furniture-lust inspiring designs is conceptual. If nothing else your wallet is spared the grievous injury designer furniture is guaranteed to cause.
Christie’s, the auction house dealing almost exclusively in amazing things that I will never be able to afford, will be offering up a mouthwatering prize for the Victorian-era enthusiast striving for the ultimate in authentic furnishings for their study; namely the desk once owned by Charles Dickens on which he wrote Great Expectations The proceeds of the auction, to be held in June, will be going to the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, which the desk was gifted to by Jeanne–Marie Dickens, Countess Wenckheim. The desk is expected to fetch between £50,000-£80,000, or eight hundred billion American dollars.
Certainly such a price is a trifle when one imagines the value in being able to sit snug in their meticulously reconstructed office, taking nib in hand to inscribe intricately constructed sentences overflowing with poetic prose, running on and on — seemingly forever — a vast torrent of elegant, meandering descriptors, strung together with a delicate chain of commas and semicolons wending their way through a variety of subjects and encompassing the expansive gulf of human emotion in its brilliant and contradictory entirety and in doing so, laying out a map of the societal landscape, a grid work of people’s interactions with other people and the effects of these interpersonal relationships in regards to society especially in terms of the class system which, regardless of how much man has progressed, has yet to be exorcised completely — and indeed in some ways has become even worse — the gully between the wealthy and poor becoming akin to an awesome canyon; a canyon filled with a deep morass of misery and despair from which the destitute can only struggle helplessly glancing upwards on occasion to see the rich, the masters of this brave, new, industrialized world looking down upon them, greedy sneers curling their lips as they watch the less fortunate desperately try to raise themselves up, while only pushing others down further into the muck until they themselves become worn-out, weary, and weak and the next struggling body comes along to begin the whole process again; a twisted and deliberate cycle perpetrated by those on high, licking their lips at the spectacle laid out before them, a spectacle from which only they reap the rewards but at the cost of their eternal souls.
A duo of lamps by Swedish designer Alexander Lervik for fans of the central nervous system. The brain lamp was created from a scan of the designer’s brain.
One of my favorite things about scouring the internet for fantastic furniture with which to fill my meagerly furnished home (or as is more often the case, bemoaning the lack of dosh that prohibits me from doing so) is analyzing the pieces that catch my eye and making mental notes of how they are constructed so as to attempt my own (far less expensive) reproductions. Such is the case with the Reel Rocker.
How Reel Furniture can charge $870 for this in good conscience is beyond me. It’s simply a massive wire spool converted to recliner/rocking chair, and to be honest looks a bit uncomfortable. But I’m an enterprising young fop, and don’t balk at the idea of a bit of work to replicate (and improve) on a design, so away it was filed as a possible project should I find myself with time and the scraps I need.
Granted, this design might not seem appealing as it is, but imagine a few coats of stain or paint, a bit of burgundy brocade upholstery, upgraded stops, polished fixtures over exposed bolts and suddenly this otherwise laughably expensive piece becomes something you can be proud of. Keep in mind I’m no enemy of craftsmanship, some hideously expensive pieces are justifiably priced, but making obscene gestures at my wallet by way of overpricing is a sure fire way start my gears to turning.
Ecthomo is our answer to interior design and fashion writing, an attempt to bring Ectomo into the home if you will; brought to you by Octobee’s very own sequin-bedecked dandy. If you can recline luxuriously on it, wear it, lust after its aesthetic, or resent the wealthy that can afford it, then on Ecthomo it belongs.
The ability to pull up stakes and move as the mood strikes is nearly a necessity for those of us keeping pace with the frenetic rhythms of the 22nd century. Yes, we do harbor an appreciation for the finer things in life, but usually only so long as they can be broken down into their component parts and hastily shuffled from briefly occupied dwelling to briefly occupied dwelling with relative ease.
Today we bring you several pieces of furniture that provide just such convenience, starting with the Casulo. Created by German designers Marcel Krings and Sebastian Mühlhäuser as part of their dissertation at the Köln International School of Design, the Casulo is a stroke of modular furniture genius measuring 31″x47″ at it’s most compact. Fully disassembled (a process taking about 10 minutes with two people and requiring no tools) it provides a bed, desk, bookshelf, smallish wardrobe, and a little storage for the bits you’ve picked up in your travels.
For minimalist neo-nomads a single Casulo would surely suffice; add a second to the mix and nearly all your needs are met, leaving a bit left over with which to get inventive. Sure, It’s a bit flimsy looking and not everyone wants to stare at chartreuse furniture everyday, but it’s an amazing conceptual starting point and the refinement of the idea in the process to market will surely result in a fantastic piece.
Hit the jump for more Ecto-approved hyper-functional, modular designs.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
