Eco-friendly Furniture

Recycled Paperpulp Cabinet by Debbie Wijskamp

It never ceases to surprise us that much of good, sustainable design is also deliciously fun. Take Debbie Wijskamp’s paperpulp cabinets, for instance. They are what their name implies: drawers and shelves made out of pureed paper mache. And while I want to write sophisticated sentences with phrases like ‘materials reuse’ and ‘resource conservation,’ I just can’t help thinking about how glorious it must be, in a third-grade sort of way, to mash paper into furniture. Wijskamp’s process validates these daydreams.

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Rocking Chair Uses Motion to Power Attached OLED Lamp

by Ariel Schwartz, 10/17/09

The serene back-and-forth movement of a rocking chair is nothing if not relaxing. It can also be useful and productive, according to Rochus Jacob. The designer’s Murakami Chair, a winner in designboom’s Green Life competition, uses the kinetic energy produced by rocking to power an attached OLED lamp.

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Links Roundup of the Week: Seating

by Olivia Chen, 07/24/09

Summertime is fun, but can be tiring — and all you need sometimes is to sit your tush down on some nice, comfy seating. And if you are like us, you want to be locating yourself on a nice bench or stool that is sustainably sourced and constructed. There is certainly no shortage of functional and eco-friendly furniture to be found out there, and this is what we noticed this week in the blog-o-sphere.

Notcot features a modular and biodegradable lounging chair made of plywood, and a stool made of chopsticks and steamer trays.

Core77 tells us about a hand-woven aluminum chair.

Re-nest is highlighting chairs made from recycled whiskey barrels.

Scrap Lab: Furniture Made of Industrial Scraps

by Olivia Chen, 06/27/09

Scrap Lab is a group of designers based out of Bangkok’s Kasetsart University’s Architecture program that creates fun and innovative furniture out discarded industrial scraps. The group makes an eclectic variety of furniture, from a funky shaggy lamp to a lounge chair with a quilt-block pattern — all masterfully re-purposing materials that were once considered waste. While their list of materials includes traditional materials such as wood and metal, it also includes less traditional items such as foam and rope. The purpose of the group’s work is to not only create physical products, but also to collect research on how discarded materials can be used effectively to design functional and aesthetically pleasing pieces.

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Recycled Egg Carton ‘Tamago’ Furniture by Merci Design

We’re impressed with this ‘grade A’ upcycling of egg carton pulp into multifaceted children’s play funiture. The Tamago (Japanese for ‘egg’) furniture series by Latvian design team, Merci Design consists of seven soft-contour furniture forms which may be easily manuvered to create letter and number patterns for playtime learning and fun. …

Recycled Fiber Furniture Filled With Air

Designed by Mario Bellini for Meritalia, an Italian furniture maker, the Via Lattea furniture line looks like a collection of homemade marshmallows. Light as air, these chairs and couches are made from steel mesh combined with recycled fiber sacks formerly used to transport grain, stones, and sugar. Bellini and Meritalia showed their new line this year at the Milan Furniture Fair and we’re fascinated by the glowing chairs and air-filled sacs.

VIDEO: Inhabitat Green Tour of BKLYN Designs

It’s hard to capture all of the excitement of this year’s BKLYN Designs in words and photos alone – which is why we’re thrilled to bring you a video tour of our favorite green design picks from the show! Follow Inhabitat founder Jill Fehrenbacher and crew as they scout out hot new products and get exclusive interviews with the designers that created them. For more coverage of the stellar show, be …

BKLYN Designs Sneak Peek: Uhuru Designs

Lots of up-and-coming and established designers will present new collections at BKLYN Designs this weekend, and we don’t want to miss a single, solitary piece of work—which is why we love getting an advanced look at what’s to come! Bill Higendorf, co-founder of Brooklyn–based furniture company Uhuru Design, sent us a sneak peak of the three new locally and sustainably produced designs he and partner Jason Horvath are debuting at BKLYN Designs this week. While they’re every bit as functional as Uhuru’s previous products, the limited edition Stitched Table, Standard Chair and Metal Stoolen have a little added oomph that sets them apart.

Greypant’s Cutting-Edge Slice Chair

While perusing Graypants‘ catalog of eco-friendly furnishings we were particularly impressed by the lovely lines of this Slice chair. The cantilever chaise has a layered wood structure that allows an ottoman to slide out from beneath its seat. It’s an elegant design that achieves a versatile form factor via the efficient use of materials.

SCRAP LIGHTS Made from Twice Recycled Cardboard

Recently we introduced you to Seattle’s Graypants Inc. and their beautiful line of sustainable Scrap Chairs. In the process of fine-tuning their creations, Seth and Jonathan were captivated by the interplay of light and shadows across the corrugations of their cardboard chair and decided to recast its surplus material as a series of stunning Scrap Lights. We love the way these luminous lanterns cast rippling rivulets of light through their corrugated seams, and their twice-recycled construction strikes us as a shining example of sustainable design at its finest.

Graypants’ Gorgeous Recycled Scrap Chairs

Seattle based Graypants channels an exuberant work ethic into elegant pieces of sustainable furniture. Their set of Scrap Chairs are composed entirely of upcycled materials ranging from from finely polished plywood to corrugated cardboard and printed publications. Each piece develops out of a fluent process that perfectly encompasses their innovative approach to design: “Consider everything an experiment. Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail. There’s only make”.

BKLYN SNEAK PEEK: Bamboo Furniture from Ecosystems

New sustainable furniture company EcoSystems creates cute, family-friendly furniture that is as thoughtful of the environment as it is to the owner. Starting with renewable materials, EcoSystems follows an earth-minded agenda from start to finish, including taking responsibility for their designs at end of its (first) lifecycle, by taking back and recycling their furniture when you are done with it. Did we mention this stuff is super cute and durable – coming in a variety of primary colors and innovation seating/table configurations? Ecosystems will be showing at BKLYN Designs this weekend, and you can be sure that Abigail and Jill will be stopping at this booth during Sunday’s Mother’s Day Green Design Walking Tour >

MILAN SALONE PREVIEW: Ryan Frank Zig Bamboo Shelf

What better way to kick off our Milan Furniture Fair countdown than with our favorite ‘free-range’ furniture designer Ryan Frank. Frank’s modular bamboo creation, dubbed ‘Zig’, is just one of many designs we’ve got our eye on for this year’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile starting next week. We’ve got three Inhabitants heading to Italy to bring comprehensive coverage of the 2008 furniture fair and get a glimpse of what green looks like on the international scene this Spring. If the Zig storage/display system is any indication of what eco-friendly design treats are in store for us, things are looking very promising.

MODERN SLANT Eco End Table from Todd Laby

Ever since we first laid eyes on Todd Laby’s stunning green furniture design back in 2005, we’ve been huge fans. Unlike so much of what passes for ’sustainable design’ these days, this thoughtful designer manages to make green design about more than simply using bamboo or eco-friendly adhesives in standard designs, but instead rethinks the very nature and construction of the objects we own, and does so in a way that is sleek, chic, and always provocative. In his ‘Modern Slant’ line of plyboo coffee tables, the bottoms and legs of the tables are positioned at acute angles in order to efficiently balance books and magazines, and keep them from falling over like in your typical flat shelf. Now Laby has a brand new end table that utilizes this same clever idea of angular legs to support all of your literature needs.

‘THIS TABLE WILL SELF-DESTRUCT’ by STUDIO 1a.m.

An often-overlooked tenet of the green design process is the creation of objects that tell a story, that have a history, and that engage with the user to extend their life span beyond the disposable and ephemeral. Donna Piacenza of Studio 1a.m. (the creative genius behind eco-friendly jewelry like the Cork Cuff and Industrial Bloom) has just produced a new table concept that does just this, flirting with the boundaries of mass production and customization. The table concept, titled ‘This Table Will Self Destruct,’ is a simple, clean-lined design constructed of sorghum and concrete. With each order, a “pixel” is removed from the design, so that each owner receives a different, progressively deconstructed iteration of the original table. After x number of productions, the table will cease to exist. The table raises some interesting questions of sustainability, durability, disposability, and the mass production design market.

Eco-Friendly Bamboo Designs by Todd Laby

Last week I attended the opening of the Bay Area Furniture Art exhibit at the Blue Room Gallery. One of the designers that stood out to my green-hunting eye was Todd Laby, whose company, Rhubarb Decor, aims to improve the perception of green furniture through “aesthetics with ethics.”