Upcycling scraps is more than just putting pieces back together – it involves first unwinding mental associations, then reconstituting them from scratch.

Made of everything you can think of (and a few things you didn’t), these refab furnishings from Studio Ubico uses what is at hand but mixes it up as much as possible along the way, including Douglass fir, oak, beech and plywood, paper, brass and more.

Drawers do, of course, have the components to make nice shelves, but who would have thought to turn them every which way before redeploying them for reuse? Or slicing off a section to tilt them up against a wall?

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And while wooden scraps may remind us abstractly of logs, but this kind of literal reinterpretation (i.e. turning bits and pieces back into solid stumps) is anything but obvious, and in many regards trickier than starting with a clean slate.