Conjoined (the party)

It looks like designers have been hanging out in the weirdest part of the natural history museum lately. Interesting creatures are coming out of our favorite studios, in pairs attached at the hip, head or back.

When a stool and a chair come together to create a bench/table, you have Established and Son’s ‘Table-bench-chair’. A multi-functional piece where the parts that went into it are easily identifiable, the ‘Table-bench-chair’ could potentially be surgically separated but not without each piece losing a little bit of themselves. 

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Jurgen Bey’s Kokon series wraps existing furniture pieces together in a PVC skin, a novel approach to the ‘reuse’ part of ‘reduce-reuse-recycle’. This process gives the final piece a bit of an uncomfortable feeling, similar to having your leg trapped in a potato sac with someone else’s, or wearing long-johns made for two.

Christopher Kurtz’s ‘Typical Windsor Form’ is one of those freaks of nature that is strangely able to survive and thrive in the wilderness although it clearly shouldn't be able to hold itself upright.

The ‘Cinderella’ table by Jeroen Verhoeven is a computer generated form, using a loft tool between two outlines of traditional furniture pieces.It reads a bit like the furniture equivalent of digitally morphing two faces together to see what their offspring might look like.

Incidentally, this is what Louis XV and Louis XVI’s baby would look like:

(Pretty similar to either one, but then again they’re related)

A student experiment for Baccarat led to this double stemmed glass. One could imagine a pretty humorous seesaw scene between two drunks drinking out of the same vessel. (If only Laurel and Hardy were still around!)

Ingo Maurer must have gotten in touch with his engineering side to create this ‘Floating Table’for Established and Sons, as it is a model of efficiency. It’s true when you think about it: why should a table have legs? It’s just a waste of material and space.

A different kind of circus act, the ‘Oneness’ extendable furniture system by Kyuhyung Cho and Hironori Tsukue is reminiscent of the ‘Flying Brothers of (insert homeland here)’. This acrobatic chair creates quite the sculptural element.

by Claire Toussaint