Dutch designer Frans Schrofer of Studio Schrofer has created the Möbius Chair for a design competition conducted by Fritz Becker, a German manufacturer of formed wood products. Responding to Fritz Becker’s competition, Frans Schrofer submitted 3 chair designs, one of which was a rough pencil sketch of an undulating circular form with convex and concave lines, pushing the limits of wood lamination and 3D forming. The chair was named Möbius for its resemblance of a continuous and twisted ribbon of wood. Because of it’s sheer complexity, we were pretty convinced it wouldn’t be selected, but we wanted the chance to challenge the commercial chair designs, lamination process, and push 3D technology “way out there”. To our utter amazement, the Möbius was not only a finalist, but also selected to be among the 25 to be prototyped and displayed during the Interzum 2009 exhibition. Becker’s craftsmen applied a warm grained veneer on the circular contour of the chair – the result is stunning.
Visit the Studio Schrofer website – here. Some photos of the chair being produced:There are a lot of clever ways to lounge around. But this product, the Lamzac Hangout, is the lounge-iest thing WE’VE EVER SEEN. When compressed, it fits in a little pouch and weighs two pounds. Inflated, it’s about 6.5 feet long and three feet wide, which means it can probably fit one human lying down, and a few humans sitting down. Lamzac is the Netherlands-based company that created the Hangout ($70 + $16 shipping to the US), a sofa-like lounger that inflates within seconds. According to the about page, the company’s name was inspired by the Dutch word lamzak, which means “a lazy person or literally, an inactive bag.” To set up the Hangout, unroll the bag and wave it through the air. Then roll up the end to pressurize the bag, and clip it closed.That’s all there is. God, it looks comfortable. This man has reached peak chill. The Lamzac Hangout took off in September, when the company posted a video titled, “Great for chilling in the park.”
It garnered 12 million views and over 255k shares. The video’s popularity was beyond the company’s wildest expectations and the Hangouts were immediately sold out. As of last week, LamZac claimed that their first batch is due to ship on April 4, and that they are working on a new release date. Product manager Damian Baselmans told BuzzFeed, “In a matter of hours we pushed our production capacity to as far as we could go, while ensuring we keep our build quality as high as possible.” “We’re still working very hard on catching up to everybody … because [the reaction] was truly was much bigger and faster than we ever expected,” he said of the shipping delays. The company employs just eight people and hopes to eventually sell the Hangout on Amazon. In another comment, the company wrote: “The order of magnitude which we grew with in just one week is something amazing and not something we predicted beforehand… As you can imagine we would love nothing more than to be able to sell a Hangout to all and we’re putting everything we’ve got into making that a reality.
For the time being, we hope people can muster the patience until we’re back in stock. Until then, you can dream about napping in it… Hanging out with friends in it… Even working from it?!?!A husband-and-wife team is brightening up the sober Dutch design world.On a dreary, rainy day in Amsterdam, the design studio of Stefan Scholten and Carole Baijings stands out like a fluorescent beacon. The ground floor of their two-story office overlooking the Ij lake is divided by swiveling textile panels in wild color pairings that shouldn’t harmonize — hot pink and olive green — yet somehow do. Tables are set with flowers in matte porcelain vases; shelves are laden with globes of tinted glass, test swatches and bright foam molds. Michael Maharam, for whom Scholten & Baijings have made a series of gridded textiles, called this space a “candy shop for the curious eye.” The firm has designed everything from clocks for Ikea to components for a Mini One car to dishwasher-safe Japanese porcelain that resembles recycled paper.
The husband-and-wife team’s fluency with color sets them apart in the relatively muted Dutch design scene, as does their conviction that conceptual design can be married to industrial production. Scholten studied at the prestigious Design Academy Eindhoven around the time one of his professors started Droog, the influential design collective that emphasized a wry, postmodern, handmade approach to furniture and housewares — one that was openly hostile to the pragmatic concerns of industry and manufacturing. Droog prototypes — like Tejo Remy’s iconic 1991 dresser of mismatched drawers bound together by a belt — had an appealingly comic, D.I.Y. quality, but were often too costly, or too outlandish, to produce in anything but the smallest editions. Nevertheless, many of the most famous designers to come out of the Netherlands in the last two decades, from Marcel Wanders to Hella Jongerius, are associated in some way with the movement.“At school you had two options: Become a Droog designer or become a Droog designer,” Scholten jokes. “
It was sort of frustrating. Somehow people thought that a creative process couldn’t be linked to an industrial process. Well, Eames did it. All the greats did. Why couldn’t we try?” In 1999, he met Baijings through a mutual friend, and the connection between them — aesthetic, romantic, dialectic — was instant. “Our method is the atelier way of working, one that emphasizes constructive thinking,” Baijings says. “It means making your own materials, your own colors, your own models, and looking at what’s happening under your hands. Is your idea really working? Or is it more suitable for another design?”Today the pair works in their studio but sketches in a light-filled home office off their bedroom. The design critic Louise Schouwenberg termed Scholten & Baijings’s hyper-elegant attention to detail “almost un-Dutch.” But their three-bedroom 1920s house on the south side of the city seems the very picture of lowlands good living. There is an antique wooden bruidskist, or wedding chest (a gift from Baijings’s parents, made in Indonesia), fresh flowers and an original marble-lined entryway, which Scholten says is “classic Amsterdam.
You put all the money in the places people can see, and then forget about what’s inside.”Baijings’s grandmother lived in the house for 65 years before the couple moved in, and together they restored some parts, and gut-renovated others — like the ash-green kitchen, where they added custom aluminum cabinets and a matching wall made of textured Pandomo, a washable stuccolike surface. Arrayed on the kitchen counter is a deceptively random mix of design objects and everyday things (a bag of pasta, a few artichokes and a clove of garlic sitting on a papier-mâché and willow wood centerpiece they created for the Dutch design collector and retailer Thomas Eyck). You can find these groupings all over the house: in the room of their 20-month-old son, Rem — whose clothes are displayed on open shelves like museum pieces — and again in the living room, where timeless objects (a Josef Hoffmann tea set) mingle with family ephemera (Baijings’s hospital wristband, souvenirs from their travels, successful prototypes, failed prototypes).