IKEA furniture have the merit of not being expensive. However, they often look pretty standard. Moreover, they are found everywhere, so they give a deja-vu impression. Hence the idea of the Italian design firm Teste di Legno (wooden heads!)  to customize IKEA furniture, e.g. a design desk ou another piece of office furniture, to create new design desks, office furniture, and even home furniture.

Customization is achieved by combining several IKEA furniture parts to form a single unit, sometimes adding colors and decorations. The result is interesting, isn’t it?

An emerging trend in furniture, whether office furniture or home furniture, it is recycling objects of daily use to make original and functional furniture having a unique charm, while providing  a touch of sympathy. Here are some examples:

Coffe tables from car tires

tire-table

The Italian design firm Tavomatico realized small design tables that also serve as a storage space from car tires, to which it has just added two panels of Plexiglas and wheels.

Beautiful lamps made with recycled cassettes

recycled cassettes lamp

People at OOO My Design have found a way to recycle the tapes. This collective based in Madrid uses the tapes to make lamps, to put on a stand or hang from the ceiling. It is true that our consumer society produces billions of objects that are then thrown when a new, more efficient technology arrives. This was the case of tapes, abandoned to adopt the CD-ROM. It would be economically very profitable to transform waste into objects of such daily use.

Vespa design chairs, a brilliant idea

Vespa chairs

Another example: the designers of Bel & Bel in Barcelona, ​​thanks to whom, when the time comes for some Vespas to retire, they will be transformed into still elegant leather office chairs.
All chairs are made with Vespa original frames, which are then padded and lined with leather to give you office chairs among the most comfortable.

Finally, shelves for office or home made from old skateboards

Furniture that sometimes would not of sufficient quality for a professional office furniture, but which are of interest in terms of design and production costs.

skateboard shelves

Missoni’s fashion

Italian design is well ranked worldwide among the most innovative and creative. That’s why La Mercanti, specialising in design office furniture from Italy, wants to thank hereby a master in Italian design. Italian fashion designer Ottavio Missoni, a master of color and style, just died. Known to all as Tai Missoni, he was the man who revolutionized fashion, and not only the Italian one, who has dared bringing new patterns and colors on the catwalks, who has captured the world with its yarns. Death took him away on May 9th, 2013; he was 92, born in 1921 in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

The encounter that will forever change the history of fashion takes place in London: there Ottavio Missoni met Rosita Jelmini, the woman who would later become his wife. Together, they open a first small textile workshop in Gallarate, near Milan, but from that moment on, his life changes radically. In 1950, he founded the Italian fashion house, in the seventies its success is known worldwide. Makes it popular with a scandal in 1967, in the Palazzo Pitti, his models parading without underwear and under the lights appear naked bodies to the public.

Missoni was a free spirit, who managed to introduce innovation, a craftsman who creates something brilliant and unique from nothing, an artist of color, who for the first time has approached nuances that nobody had dared. His geometric lines, his abstract patterns, have conquered the fashion market. His style is that of the “put together”, pulling colors and shades, forming a veritable kaleidoscope of fantasies. And the colors he chose were not random, but wer born from his life.

In the biography he wrote, «from Dalmatia and Dubrovnik I brought with me the blues, that smell overseas, orange and red sunsets over the Adriatic, the warm yellow ocher and brown flecked speak of rocks and sand, lapped, reshuffled and eroded by the waves. Cannot miss the blacks, which blend. And then the purple, my favorite color, in all its nuances. If it looks good, it’s always there, even if it appears at first sight. “

Her fashion has been continuous research and exploration, ingenuity and hard work, elegance and simplicity. His works of art most times have been exhibited in major museums. His unique style, the plot of the simple yarn, the seemingly random juxtaposition of different colors, gave him the opportunity to enter the history of fashion. A lifetime of success but, he’s never moved away from his family. Beside him he has always held his wife and three children, Angela, Vittorio and Luca.

Karim Rashid is one of the most prolific designers of his generation. Over 3000 designs in production, over 300 awards and working in over 40 countries attest to Karim’s legend of design. Below in the pictures together with La Mercanti at Milan design week, presentation of Hook range by Newform.

Karim’s work is featured in 20 permanent collections and he exhibits art in galleries world wide. Karim is a perennial winner of the Red Dot award, Chicago Athenaeum Good Design award, I.D. Magazine Annual Design Review, IDSA Industrial Design Excellence award. In his spare time Karim’s pluralism flirts with art, fashion, and music and is determined to creatively touch every aspect of our physical and virtual landscape.