There’s a popular idea among some design enthusiasts that we should all, at some point, outgrow IKEA.

Offering easily accessible, low-cost contemporary flat-pack furniture, the Swedish retailer meets certain needs that are common among young people. Theoretically, those of us who rely on IKEA to furnish our homes at a young age would eventually reach a point in our lives where we have more money to spend on higher-quality furniture and be ready to upgrade.

Of course, that’s not always true. IKEA is wildly popular among all sorts of demographics around the world for good reasons, not the least of which is its budget-friendliness. But furniture company FLOYD, which is often described as “furniture for the post-IKEA set,” actually does present a strong argument for taking basic IKEA concepts and elevating them to a new level. They do it for the sake of reducing waste.

“Floyd began because we were tired of disposable furniture,” the company explains. “So we set out to design products of lasting quality for how people live today. Furniture should be made for the home, not the landfill. Made with materials that last. It’s a different way of making furniture. We call it furniture for keeping.”

In that spirit, Floyd recently added a new product to its lineup of intelligently simple furniture. “The Shelf” is a modular minimalist system consisting of solid birch plywood and ash wood supports, a few fixed metal shelves, and additional adjustable metal shelves. It comes in three colors and three sizes: tall, short, and wardrobe.

Designing your own custom configuration is a breeze, as is snapping the powder-coated steel shelves into the supports and anchoring the unit to the wall with velcro. You can purchase a “base shelf” set and then get shelf add-ons to expand it, too. Even better, assembly takes twenty minutes or less.

“In order to ensure top safety and stability, we put our shelving system through stringent testing, and it passed flawlessly! For the shelving system, we even designed some of our own hardware, to make assembly and securing the shelf to the wall as easy as can be. Add-on a display shelf to show off some of your favorite books and records, or transform a shelf into some extra closet space with the wardrobe add-on.”

Other offerings from Floyd take a similar approach, including a sofa, bed, tables, and lighting. All of them are flat-pack, lightweight, and easy to put together, perfect for millennials or anyone else who has to move fairly frequently. But they don’t compromise on quality when it comes to materials and construction.

Naturally, the prices reflect that durability, generally ranging several times as much as similar-looking offerings by IKEA and other retailers. But disposability is a big problem, and if you’re able to invest in pieces that will last decades instead of just a few years, you’ll be doing the planet a big favor (and the furniture will essentially pay for itself over time).

If you aren’t yet familiar with Floyd and want to see their furniture up close, you should check out the company’s interesting partnership with AirBnB. They’ve chosen select rental homes and apartments in places like Palm Desert, Portland, Los Angeles, the Catskills, and Toronto and outfitted them entirely in Floyd furniture.

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The new shape allows more pieces of clothing to hang in the same amount of space. An entire outfit, including accessories like scarves, belts, and necklaces, can be hung together on just one hanger.


This type of organization could be tremendously helpful for people who have trouble putting together an outfit first thing in the morning – they can simply hang up coordinating items days in advance. And since the clothing storage areas of Hanger are separated, you can change out one or two pieces of the outfit without having to take everything off of the hanger.

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If you thought 250-square-foot micro-apartments sounded small, imagine staying in a space less than 100 square feet in size. That was precisely the challenge faced in this project by Vancouver designer D Calen Knauf.

Legally, these ultra-small urban units can only be leased for three months at a time by residents and essentially contain a sink station … and nothing else. They are temporary dwelling made available at the lowest possible cost, so materials had to be kept inexpensive yet durable as well.

The emphasis in their process was on modular and multi-functional elements, minimal storage just for essentials, and objects that nest inside one another or pack as flat as possible. Minimalist detailing reinforced this approach.

“Eighty one square feet is a small place to live, and a challenging space for which to design a furniture system.  In downtown Vancouver, where rent and space is at a premium, the client with whom we worked has repurposed old buildings to create single occupant dwellings.  These apartments have a sink station, and nothing else.  The developers wanted to make these rooms more livable in order to increase the average length of stay, which is currently only 3 months.  Their constraints: a permanent, durable system (no MDF allowed) and it had to come in under $500CAD.”

“When working with a 9 foot by 9 foot room, almost everything seems to take up a lot of space, so visual lightness was a priority for us. We used wireframe-style construction to open up the room wherever possible instead of closed in panels. When flat panels were needed, we used bent steel for its low visual profile.”

“By orienting the hanger rack so that the clothes face the user instead of the conventional method, the wardrobe unit can be pared down to 12 inches deep, taking up less of a footprint into the room. Even reducing visual clutter helps make a room seem bigger, so we included a cable well behind the desk so the user can keep important things on the desk and power cords out of sight.”

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Getting a shirt off of a hanger in the morning probably isn’t either pleasant enough or annoying enough to remember it by the end of the day, but making the experience a little easier couldn’t hurt. The SOLO hanger was invented by Howard Tseng and submitted to crowdsourcing manufacturers Quirky.

The one-handed clothes hanger allows users to grip the hanger and slide it easily into or out of clothing. As seen in the video above, the unique design makes for a quick way to grab a shirt. You can even do it one-handed, a boon for those mornings that you can’t muster the energy to use both hands at once.

Maybe even more importantly, the SOLO hanger gives a much easier-than-normal way to hang a shirt up. Rather than struggling to wrestle the hanger in through the top of the shirt or finagle it in through the bottom. You very simply slip the SOLO in through the neck and squeeze the top hooks together.

“Solo is a collapsible hanger that makes it easy to hang and remove clothes in one swift motion.  Its unique design allows you to insert Solo into a wide array of shirts, and then grab and go with just one hand!  Don’t let your closet slow you down. “

“Comes in a pack of 4 and available in Charcoal or White.

Dimensions:

• Expanded – 17.75″ width x 6.5″ height x 7″ depth
• Folded – 6.75″ width x 11.5″ height x 7″ depth

Materials: polypropylene”

“Quirky is the only brand that makes products invented by real people like you. We exist to create great products because we believe great ideas don’t come from the board room – they come from the living room. Quirky wants to empower inventors and those inspired by everyday challenges to create a better “insert product here”. You can find our products on the shelves of major retailers all over the world, and our inventors too (not on the shelves, just all around the world). “

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Finding extra space in any home can be a challenge, but finding space for a home office seems to be especially confounding. If you have a spare closet (like the cluttered mess above) and a free weekend, you may have an office waiting to happen. According to this how-to at Country Living, transforming a closet into a beautiful workspace is as simple as wallpapering, painting, and installing a few simple key components. The most complex part of the transformation is the desk, constructed of two filing cabinets and a pre-made melamine desktop.

While this particular aesthetic may not appeal to everyone, the ideas presented in this transformation are extremely adaptable to any taste. Making use of the depth of the closet as well as the space on the inside of the doors, the tiny office offers nearly as much storage space as the standard cubicle-size workspace. Changing up the wallpaper, paint colors and accessories to match the rest of your home and your personal tastes, you can make a small closet into a home office that you might not mind working in.

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In a playful experimentation with materials and functions, Fraupawlik presents a surprising piece of transforming furniture. The Garderobe/Raumteiler/Bett (wardrobe/room divider/bed) is part of the Basurita line of adaptable use furniture pieces.

While perhaps not the most upscale, stylish piece of furniture ever conceived, the Garderobe/Raumteiler/Bett takes function to another level entirely. Perfect for a cramped studio apartment, the piece allows for storage, separation of spaces and sleeping – all with a tiny footprint. And because the bed goes vertical when not in use, a tiny living space can seem way more spacious while still having all of the necessities.

During the day, the object stands up to act as an open wardrobe for your shirts, suits, dresses and coats. It has the added function of working as a room divider at the same time. Because it is made of recycled materials it has a rough cut industrial look, making it seem tailor-made for a concrete loft space.

At night, the wardrobe turns into a bare-bones bed – more like a cot. The problem, of course, would be where to put your hanging clothes when you turn the object over on its side to sleep on. Using the Garderobe/Raumteiler/Bett in a guest space seems to make the most sense; that way it can still hold your clothes daily but transform temporarily when needed.

“La basurita is an interior series, which originated within the diploma project of FRAUPAWLIK. The project tempts to reduce our furniture to the essential one. Basic needs like sleep, sit, put away and stow away have the priority. Pointlessly the become everyday objects which the modern town person puts in the absence of need and interest on the street are used as a raw material. The focusing on basic needs and the functional everyday objects originating in the draught process lead back the material of the street in the living area. Multiple possibilities of utilization permit an adaptable use of the respective pieces of furniture. Thus the design from la basurita ends only with the use.”

“The bed is made up of seatbelts, a cloth rail and also of external elements. Above all it can be used as a cloth rail and a partition.Because of the interwoven lying surface its possible to create a improvised sleeping facility without needing a mattress. Additionally both external elements extend the clothe rail up to human body length and coincident the feet of the bed which create the needful stability.By mount the bed it changed into a clothe rail and partition again.”

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Innovation often spreads like wildfire – it is a wonder, really, that this 50-year-old design idea has not fully dowsed the flames of frustration in kitchens around the world. Instead of dedicating surface or sink area to drying dishes, it makes shelves serve a secondary purpose and lets you skip a step entirely.

Still found mainly in Northern Europe, the idea is simple: dishes are placed into a bottomless cupboard where each shelf drains down to the next level, and ultimately to waiting sinks and drains below. The effect? A marked decrease in the 30 thousand odd hours spent by Finnish housewives doing dishes daily (but don’t quote us on that statistic). This hidden dish draining closet eliminates a big chunk of the work.

Plastic-coated steel wire, of the kind usually found in baskets sitting inside or alongside sinks, frames each shelving layer rather than an impermeable surface, though other variants exist as well (both covered and uncovered). This hidden dish drainer closet may be the most clever and overlooked solution for cramped kitchens where full-sized dishwasher appliances simply won’t fit, but it’s far from the only option.

We are all familiar with drying mats, collapsible wood, plastic or metal dish racks and other solutions, but hanging dish racks exist on the shelves of stores like IKEA, though few allow the user to bypass the interstitial step of drying then putting away dishes.

Unlike many non-appliance amenities, this (loosely translated) ‘dish drying closet’ design and many subsequent variations can be traced back to a single inventor: Maiju Gebhard, who created it as part of the Finnish Association for Work Efficiency in the mid-1940s. Since then, though, it remains an elusive fixture in many modern kitchens outside its home continent. Making these kinds of space-saving dish racks more of a standard feature in compact kitchens would be a nice step toward universally user-friendly design.

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So you want to live in New York City just off Central Park? Prepare to cough up a few thousand dollars a month … or find a fabulous little 12-by-7-foot hole in the wall for just seven hundred dollars and learn to live a little differently, as this industrious writer has done.

In this video, we get a sneak-peak tour of life with Felice Cohen in a place where storage is sacrosanct … but bonking a head on the ceiling when waking is a real risk, and going to the bathroom requires wedging oneself onto the seat sideways.

Building up is critical and as she points out (only half joking) most New Yorkers use the stove as a supplementary closet anyway – conventional cooking is out of the question, so a hot pot and cold eats are standard fare. Still, there is some separation of activities – a work chair versus a desk chair, for instance.

A little refrigerator has to be sufficient, fewer clothes can be owned and book choices become precious decisions when both professional and personal space are in limited supply. This is just a work in progress, though, and a learning process – perhaps the basis for some future writings as well.

“Felice Cohen is an author of 5 books, a professional organizer, motivational speaker and Holocaust educator. You might have seen Felice in that infamous YouTube video of her 90-square-foot Manhattan studio. She moved into that tiny space for one reason: the low rent allowed her to quit her full time job and finish writing her first book, What Papa Told Me, a memoir about her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor. She planned to stay only one year, but something happened during that one year. Her life got better. It got larger.”

“When the YouTube video of that teeny space went viral, people around the world asked her for advice on organizing and decluttering, and praised her philosophy about ‘living large’ in a small space. That was the motivation for her second book, 90 Lessons for Living Large in 90 Square Feet (…or more), which tells how living tiny made her life larger, but it also offers lessons on how to live the life you want in any size space.”

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No matter how hard they try, no manufacturer seems to make a business-friendly suitcase where your clothes are ready right when you arrive – and you never know what you will (or won’t) find when it comes to a hotel dresser or closet.

Suitcases are one of those items that have remained almost exactly the same for many decades, with few significant upgrades in the meantime. The addition of wheels was a good start, but why not take it a little bit further? Luggage designs that make travel easier by organizing clothing in a neater and tidier way would be helpful for many travelers, especially those who need to change into something that looks sharp immediately upon arrival at their destination.

Psychic Factory has come up with an idea that is so obvious one has to wonder why no one else has done it. To be sure, if they put it into production their will be problems to solve – like how to keep clothes neat when this wheeled contraption may not travel entirely upright, or how to lock the drawers from coming open in transit. But packed full enough with locking drawers, this dresser suitcase design would make accessing and organizing clothes a lot easier.

Regardless of the small fixes that would be required to make this road-ready, the core concept is sound: a series of dresser-style drawers that simply slide out of the front of the suitcase, and a pull handle that doubles as a hangar-friendly bar from which you can suspect suits, coats and so forth in the open air and wrinkle-free.

A suitcase that basically acts as an entire mobile closet might even be nice for apartment dwellers who don’t plan to stay in one place for too long. If you’ve already stripped down your belongings KonMari style and only own exactly what you need, why not skip the big bulky furniture and go with something like this instead?

If you like this portable closet ideal, check out the suitcase that transforms into shelving on the go.

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Whether a waterless washing machine would work is probably the single biggest question one would have about such a device, but the idea behind it is hard to argue against. After all, who would not want to skip the hassle of heading to the dry cleaner each time for those few dress-clothing items that require special care?

According to its designer, Minsung Bae, a combination of humidity, ionization, ozone and air pressure can kill bacteria and remove stains clinging to a shirt – in practice, one has to wonder what the mechanism is for removing these dirty elements after finishing a cleaning cycle.

“The suit cover comprises two inflatable layers between which the clothing is placed. First of all, the O inside the cover is converted to O (ozone), effectively killing all the bacteria on the clothing. Then the fabric is blasted by pressurized air from tiny perforations in the panels to remove any dirt and detritus. No detergent or external water source is required.”

What would be really neat: a timer feature that would allow one to wear the warm and finished product in the morning, to get that feeling one has when putting on a freshly-dried pair of pants or newly-pressed dressy shirt. Power supply, waste management and some other technical details look like they have yet to be resolved, though, in addition to these other potential accessory functions.

The best part, if it works as it should: you could take these self-contained dry-cleaning containers on the road with you, and set them up in your car or hotel room to do your dirty work while in the middle of an extensive business trip. Wheels along the bottom and a pull-out handle on top make it perfect for air travel, in theory, assuming it does not constitute a too oddly-shaped (and high-tech) piece of over-sized luggage according to the TSA or specific airline.

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Under-stair storage makes a good deal of sense – after all, what else could you possibly put in an area with such odd ceilings and shallow depths? As it turns out, a bathroom may not be a bad idea for this otherwise awkward area found in virtually any two-story home plan.

Showers, sinks and mirrors may be tricky, but bathtubs and toilets do not require full standing height to work, since they can be lain in or sat on respectively. Tiny and cramped is also a bit more acceptable for a bathroom than it would be for most any other heavily-used area of a house, since its uses tend to be short.

That said, there are many ways to ‘do it wrong’ too – insufficient lighting (artificial or, ideally, natural as shown in the photo above) can kill any space, and a small one all the more quickly. Try to put too much in and you can make a cozy washroom feel more like a (water) closet.

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People like to joke about how their apartment is small or bedroom is the size of a kitchen cabinet, but for one resident of pricey Knightsbridge, this is reality – and given the location, he is not complaining. And yes, this London flat was originally an actual storage closet. Owner Ray Barker says he’s just fine with the arrangement, despite the size.

How does it work? Think thin: the long and narrow space has likewise depth-lacking (five inch deep) kitchen cabinets and skinny linear furniture to make room for walking through. Even the shower doubles as a coat rack at times. This is not the living quarters of a pack rat and requires spartan space-saving techniques and multi-functional accessories.

As a commuter, the current owner bought the place as a functional loft in the heart of London more for staying than living in. The space his dining, sleeping and living room zones (for it would be difficult to call them proper rooms) fit into a 11.5 by 6 foot area that used to be the broom cupboard of the adjacent property.

“My cozy flat is just fine for sleeping,” he said. “I can do the cleaning while lying in my sofa bed. In fact, I can wash up, answer the door, make a cuppa and go to the loo all at the same time.”

Originally priced at around $50,000, in today’s market it is on sale for $300,000. Sure, it might have only sixty square feet of livable space, but size is not everything – location is. A little bit of organic decorating brings some live and color to the walls to add to the sense of space, but it is still hard to imagine not feeling cramped if you stayed here too long. Still, it shows just how small spaces are relative – does your apartment feel a bit bigger now? (via DailyMail)

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Murphy Beds started one of the longest and strangest trends in bedroom design: the concealed, fold-down wall bed concept. In some ways, Boxetti‘s most recent attempt is much like the original idea, but by integrating surrounding storage spaces (drawers, cabinets and closet area) the goal is less to ‘hide away’ the bed than it is to celebrate the modern modular nature of this dynamic sleeping unit.

Like the other modules in the Boxetti furniture and interior design series, as much as possible is packed into an appealing, small and self-contained box, designed to save space and make installation as simple as setting the object in place. In this case, a double bed folds down, night stand folds out and wardrobe slides open all from the same side.

Moreover, the entire unit can be operated manually or by remote control and even comes in with a built-in, ambiance-adding light fixture for mood lighting or light reading at night. Shelves, drawers and clothing rail are all neatly tucked in at appropriate heights around the central fold-out-bed piece. As such, the entire unit would work well for someone with a small studio apartment space or in a living room as an extra ‘instant’ bedroom-on-demand for guests.

“Boxetti Private contains the set of basic bedroom functions –a double bed, night stand and a wardrobe. The unit is furnished with high quality stainless steel handles and accessories. The foldaway bed platform is automatically lifted by a remote control, together with a built-in night stand. The unit is equipped with a spotlight and an ambience lighting fixture above the headboard. The integrated wardrobe consists of six sections including shelves, drawers and a clothes rail. “

“Boxetti collection is driven by three basic design principles – functionality, advanced technologies and contemporary aesthetics of minimalism. Each of Boxetti modules is designed to achieve maximum efficiency of particular demands for functionality and suitability. The capability of the modules to be transformed into compactly solid blocks is essential for the design concept in order to obtain an unobstructed and comfortable space – free of uselessness. Boxetti collection is a handmade product – the quality of materials as well as structural and technological solutions endues the collection to the extent of exclusiveness.”

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