Nest

One of Apple’s minds Tony Fadell is the force behind Nest, a new thermostat manufacturer. The device is a sleeker and smarter alternative to a traditional wall eyesore most people are used to. Nest learns your heating and cooling preferences and adjusts accordingly. It is also wi-fi enabled and can be controlled directly from your computer or smartphone.

Foldboat

Foldboat is a project created by product designers Max Frommeld and Arno Mathies. The project includes the development of the rather ingenious and incredibly beautiful Boat One and Boat Two.


Designed to be easily stored and transported, the highly accessible Boat One measures 1.5m x 60cm and is made from a single sheet of 5mm thick P.E. plastic, which neatly folds in on itself. Boat Two is a more simplified version of Boat One. Instead of being folded, this special dock edition remains as a flat sheet measuring 2.5m x 1.5m and can be easily assembled using only three components.

Sometimes

Milan based designer and architect Denis Guidone has created a minimalist wrist watch for Projects Watches, named Sometimes.

Steel Landscapes

These minimalist wall sculptures by Cecilia Vissers are made from steel and aluminium and inspired by the Scottish and Irish landscapes. The pieces are characterized by simple compositions, powerful lines and laconic shapes. The surfaces retain the natural texture of the material, creating inspiring visual effects.

Thor Vigfusson’s wall sculptures

These wall sculptures by Icelandic artist Thor Vigfusson are terrific. He works with mirrors, plastic and glass in a formalist fashion with mainly subdued (but also sometimes bright) colour palettes. Reflectivity and light play an important role in the way they capture and represent the space in which they are installed.

Work No. 850

British-based conceptual artist Martin Creed produced a work for the Tate Britain in 2008 called Work No. 850. The work consists of athletes running through the gallery at timed intervals.

Aluminium Chair

Berlin based German designer Sebastian Scherer has created the Aluminium Chair as part of his Aluminium collection. The collection was presented at this year’s DMY, the International Design Festival in Berlin.

Devoid of additional materials and hardware, this chair, designed in black and white, is comprised of open loops and sleek curves. With its continuous form, one will struggle to establish where the aluminium material begins and where it ends.

Change the Record

Paul Cocksedge, London designer, moulds discarded vinyl records into a range of amplifiers for smartphones in a project called Change the Record.

Made by heating and moulding the plastic disks into a funnel shape, they amplify the sound from a phone placed inside simply through the nature of their shape. The speakers were ‘launched’ this year at a live performance to music during Ron Arad’s Curtain Call installation at the Roundhouse in London, where Cocksedge himself was heating and moulding old LPs and encouraging visitors to bring their own 12” record.

Goodbye Edison

This collection of minimal lamps, rightly called Les Fines, was created by Paris based designer FX Balléry and manufactured by Goodbye Edison. And as the brandname implies, this design is a nod to the disappearance of traditional light bulbs and the advent of new light sources. The pieces are comprised of an aluminium diffuser and steel base. The light source itself is an LED 24V lamp.

Half a Table

The hall of most houses and apartments is usually not very big. Half A Table by Miriam van der Lubbe and Niels van Eijk makes the room look bigger.

Half a table placed against a mirror changes into a whole table. That is the idea behind Half A Table. Van der Lubbe and van Eijk play with optical illusions; although due to the thickness of the mirror it is still clear that it is a small sideboard. However, the size of the mirror will make the space feel bigger.

Infrared Electric Heaters

The colder weather is beginning to set in, at least in my city of Edinburgh, so naturally my thoughts turned to heating.

Japanese design director Naoto Fukasawa of Plus Minus Zero, has produced these simple and modest infrared electric heaters. Made from steel polypropylene resin, measuring H310.0 x W330.0 x D165.0 mm and weighing a mere 1.5 kg, the smooth corned design of these heaters are simple in form and function. Featuring an easy three-step rotary selector switch; 800W (strong), 400W (weak) and off, they are available in a range of colours including light brown, beige, red, brown, pink and grey.

Round and Round Calendar

British designer, David Weatherhead has developed the Round and Round Calendar which involves three discs that read the date at the finger turn of a disc. The innovative calendars are available in a variety of colours and sure beat turning the page on the usual desk calendar.

A minimal shape, color language and hand gesture movement are brought together for a design that is both playful in use and in it’s visual presence. Round and Round Calendars are produced by Seletti.

laptopcase.ian

c.dellstrand is a Paris based company founded by Swedish designer Chistoffer Dellstrand. Specialising in working with leather, Dellstrand’s inspiration comes from Scandinavian architecture and interior design, personal belongings and everyday life.

The designs are focused on true craftsmanship, patiently producing unique accessories in which the leathers are hand cut, carefully sewn together, while the edges are painted and polished by hand. One such accessory is the laptopcase.ian. Made from only a single piece of cow leather and measuring 35.5cm x 29cm.

Photography by Lexception and Damien Vignol.

Ordinary House

Ordinary House is a single family residence, recently completed by Japanese bureau FORM / Kouichi Kimura Architects. Located in Shiga and surrounded by an underdeveloped area, the house makes an exciting visual statement. Slick and minimal, the structure has very few windows. Each window strategically laid out to direct movement of natural light in the interior.

Inhabitat Furniture

This Inhabitated Furniture apartment in Paris, France was designed in 2011 by Nicolas Reymond. Besides the large volumes, very simple in form, the architect explain the maximum and innovative use of space.

The renovation proposes, instead of walls, two large furnitures accessible by each side, to set up the space. These furnitures include and hide storages, kitchen cupboards, dressing, doors and bathrooms. They also separate day from night uses. A fluid and multipurpose space is provided: the entrance space is used alternately as a kitchen or as an office.

clOck

clOck is a strikingly minimal project from UK based designer ShihWen Wang. The shape of this simple and rather unique timepiece has been stripped down to just a ring, making its visual impact on a wall, subtle and elegant. The look of the clock changes depending on a surface it put against, allowing the user to co-create the design in some way.

betweenShadows

Designed by Benjamin Graindorge, in association with Paris based Design Gallery YMER&MALTA, betweenShadows is a minimalist alcove. A piece of art produced in only 8 pieces signed and numbered.

Cards by Sam Dallyn

Oxford based designer and art director Sam Dallyn recently created these minimal playing cards as a personal project.

Framed Moca

Designed by Koenraad Ruys for Belgian product company Moca, theFramed storage unit is a varnished buffet composed of multiple compartments in different colors, all integrated into a black steel frame.

Sail

Sail collection of etherial chairs by Piergiorgio Cazzaniga has been recently revealed at Andreu World in Valencia. The silhouette of the Sail chair is slim and simple, the weight is reduced to a minimum thanks to the clever combination of polypropylene and fiberglass. The shape goes beyond aesthetics, however, embracing human body and providing strategic curves where needed.

Rest Days

Luca Sironi is a Milan based photographer and filmmaker who recently completed his conceptual photography project titled Rest Days. The project comprises 24 colour photographs depicting a series of closed shop shutters.

Hotel Zenden

The Hotel and Sport School Zenden was built by Wiel Arets Architects and is located within three monumental town houses near the river Maas in Maastricht, the Netherlands. The hotel includes nine rooms, a pool, a lounge, and a patio. The concept of the project was to transform a once-disparate assortment of guest rooms and athletic spaces – formerly known as the Hotel and Sport School Zenden – into one cohesive hotel.


Wiel Arets opened up the ground floor completely to make it feel like one continuous space. A sleek white palette, including white polyurethane floors, and minimalist, box-like rooms with Corian inlays and night-stands integrated into the walls, washing tables placed on floating shelves, TV’s hidden behind reflecting glass and bathroom doors serving as mirrors blend the interior and the three houses together.


Photography by Jan Bitter.

Nomu

Designed by Lee West, Nomu is a cork and ceramic teapot that has no handle but instead has a removable cork sleeve to stop you burning your hands.

The pot, and the accompanying ceramic cups are called Nomu, meaning to drink in Japanese and are produced by Eno Studio.

Yabané

The Yabané dresser by French-Japanese design duo Aki and Arnaud Cooren is an example of high craftsmanship and simplicity. It is also a celebration of the material. Handmade of ash wood by French woodworking firm Walnutsgroove, the piece shows off natural grain lines and knots. Designers claim that their work is often inspired by Sori Yanagi designs, which is clearly pronounced in this piece.

The name Yabané is referring to a traditional graphic pattern (the word means ‘arrow’ in Japanese). One of the main features of the dresser is its construction, allowing it to open on both sides. Thus, it can be placed in the middle of a room as an elegant and functional room divider.

R.I.P. Steve Jobs

X / I / I

German creative studio Deutsche & Japaner, based in Mannheim, specialise in a variety of disciplines, such as graphic design, product design, interior design, illustration and scenography as well as conceptual creation and strategic brand escort.

Earlier this year, the studio designed a limited edition book titled X / I / I. The minimal designed book (particularly the cloth cover) is the first in the series from TENWORDSANDONESHOT, presenting the featured artists from the blog in a printed publication.

The blog and the book share the same rules in the sense that there are only ten words written by the artists to outline their personality and just one studio image to offer an impression. Each entry has been designed in a completely different style using various sizes and typeface for both imagery and comments.

Orime Mouse

The most recent product by Nendo is Orime.

Orime, created for Elecom, is a wireless laser mouse that has some parallels with a Nighthawk Stealth Fighter aircraft. Rather than the usual curved mouse this one is formed entirely from flat surfaces.

Photography by Hiroshi Iwasaki.

Ora Lattea

The minimal design of Denis Guidone‘s Ora Lattea watch, created for Nava Design is abstinent. The piece plays with our expectations of what a traditional timepiece should be. Instead of hands there are two moving dots circling around the third one in the middle. The bigger dot represents the hour while the smaller dot represents the minute; the central dot remains fixed.

The Boat Series

Danish born and Copenhagen based designer Ditte Fischer specialises in hand-crafted ceramics. Some of Fischer’s work, such as the Boat Serieshave made its mark as a modern design classic.

Spaces, Etc.

These sculptural objects by New York based designer Ron Gilad, together called Spaces, Etc., are minimal three-dimensional outlines of various familiar shapes. Gilad is known for his experiments with architectural forms, which were triggered by an infamous New York moment. In 2008 his entire building was evicted due to a fire code violation. Living without a permanent place for three months, the designer started exploring the idea of spaces and homes, trying to define what a home really is.

The visual tension between the lines is so strong, the objects show the signs of optical illusions, stretching the frontier between transparent and tangible, functional and abstract.

The KM Table

The KM Table, designed by french architect Jean Nouvel is a narrow 85cm wooden table, made to measure, with a minimum length of 4m. The example exhibited here measures 6m 35, according to the dimensions of the gallery.

The proportions of the table are determined by a constructive principle whereby its span is miraculously supported within the thickness of the material itself, which is a lamination of oak and hornbeam. With this building technique, any length of table is imaginable, even one kilometre…The table is produced in Italy by Unifor.