From lighting to furniture, sculptures, room dividers, children’s toys, and everywhere in-between – designers are turning to cardboard to create great green decor and sustainable design. Most are using recycled cardboard or repurposed cardboard boxes to create modern sustainable furniture and accessories. The Milan Furniture Fair and ICFF both featured many incredible cardboard designs.
There is nothing more that we love at The Surface Blog than great sustainable design! The cardboard craze started back when one of societies most relevant architects Frank Gehry designed a cardboard furniture collection in 1972 for Vitra. The cardboard Wiggle Chair and Wiggle Ottoman are made from 60 intricate layers of cardboard. He was way ahead of the trend of sustainable design with this collection. The Wiggle chair is surprisingly sturdy and hugely popular. It is now available in new colors with modern accented lacquered edges.
Cardboard design is so popular that retailer West Elm recently collaborated with top tier event designer David Stark to create cardboard designed furniture and accessories for their latest Manhattan store opening. The limited edition products were made from left over store catalogs and waste from packaging material.
Stark created vases and clocks out of recycled cardboard and a chair, ottoman and topiary out of shredded catalogs. The event was extremely successful and proves that sustainable design can be both profitable and responsible!
More photos of the cardboard event at the David Stark Sketchbook.
Now on to Surface Blog Top Picks! The Speech Bubble coffee table from Leo Kempf is an instant conversation piece — Pun intended! The sturdy table is made from corrugated cardboard that is made of high recycled content cardboard and hardboard (compressed secondary wood fibers – both formaldehyde-free, and resin free).
Bloxes are building blocks made of interlocking pieces of corrugated cardboard folded together. Their shape and structure make them strong and lightweight. Bloxes can connect with each other on all six sides, so you can build walls, benches, tables, tunnels — basically whatever you can think of. The internal structure even dampens sound and are great for managing acoustics in offices, studios and other environments.
Graypants Studio tops our picks for cardboard lighting design. The Scrap Light is made from stacked corrugated cardboard and is completely sustainable.
Photos from Left: Irregular Shaped Pendant, Disc Pendant
Along with making cardboard furniture, designers are using cardboard in the design of everyday items such as clothing hangers as their are an estimated 8 billion that pile up in landfills every year.
The Ditto Hanger is made from 100% recycled and compressed paperboard, and uses vegetable inks and water-based adhesives.
And of course we cant forget the kids! Fold School offers free cardboard furniture patterns for basic children’s furniture which are downloadable and printable! Imagine slapping a few mini wall decals on these chairs, like the Groovy Flowers, or perhaps some colorful dots from the new Micro Dots Wall Decal set.
They are relatively easy to assemble and teach kids about green sustainable design! The Fold School design mission is to make good design available for everyone although they are more than happy to get a donation in order to maintain their emerging new field!
Way Basics is an eco-friendly furniture company with a great line of children’s basic green furniture that requires no tools, fasteners or screws. They have an environmentally sound manufacturing process that turns post-consumer recycled paper into superbly strong boards that weigh 62% less than particle board. The result is just as solid and structurally sound as any wood furniture out there today.
The 3 Spinning Cubes is a great storage piece for toys, books, craft supplies, anything you can dream up! Colors can be mixed and matched and the pieces are extremely easy to assemble. The square table can morph from basic coffee table to craft table to dining table, and the boards are even water resistant.
We continue to search for the latest in cardboard designs and sustainable design and will update the blog regularly with new green decor trends as we discover them.
