Forget Flat-Pack, This Is The Easiest Furniture To Assemble At Home

Innovative furniture company Opendesk just released two new furniture items, perfect for your workspace, and you can assemble both without so much as a single tool.

In collaboration with London-based designer Thor ter Kulve and Chicago-based designers Pia Narula and Sam Devenport of 57st Design, Opendesk created the pieces using the same techniques as in traditional Japanese joinery.

Ter Kulve designed the Bundle Desk using his own limited workspace —the designer works from a canal boat in London— as a reference. The desk is ideal for people who value flexibility in their office, as it can be taken apart and re-assembled easily thanks to the joinery techniques used in the design. It’s comprised of five pieces held together by slots and compression fittings that are easy to configure.

“I think it’s fair to say that Japanese carpenters have mastered joinery. By re-designing the joints for digital fabrication, I could replicate the functional and aesthetic advantages of Japanese joinery without years of experience,” ter Kulve told Dezeen.

Opendesk is also selling the Linnea Bookshelf, designed by Narula and Devenport and equally inspired by traditional joinery. It’s held together by a similar compression fittings-joints combination and has plenty of space for displaying all your favorite decor pieces (or for keeping your office essentials organized, if you’re using the bookcase in conjunction with the desk for a chic workspace).

“We wanted to build a strong, functional, and [a] visually simple shelving unit that could also be put together and taken apart with ease, and without the need for any hardware,” Narula told Dezeen.

Testing out these innovative design technologies makes sense for Opendesk, a London-based company whose business model is as unique as the items it creates. It’s essentially an online platform for local making, connecting customers with independent craftspeople all over the world who produce items on demand. They currently focus on creating workspace furniture and much of the design development is done virtually between external designers and the team at Opendesk —the design duo behind the bookshelf never even met in-person with anyone from the company.
“With Pia and Sam based in the US and Opendesk in the UK, the Linnea Bookshelf has been through a distributed design development journey. Resources were shared digitally and the design was prototyped in both London and Chicago, the result being a beautiful bookshelf that can be made locally anywhere in the world,” says Josh Worley, the content lead at Opendesk.

This means that while you can get estimated prices for each piece (the Bundle Desk is estimated at $554 and the Linnea Bookshelf is estimated at $500), you’ll need to use Opendesk to request quotes from local makers in your neighborhood to get your final price. The future of easy-to-assemble, locally made furniture is here.

Source: Dezeen

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