I’ll admit, I’ve never seen ‘Cyberpunk’ furniture before I saw the Toadstool by Seongmin Kim. Inspired by poisonous mushrooms (hence the name), this futuristic piece of furniture is both appealing and unsettling at the same time. The stool features a sitting surface, but is also armed with (literally) 8 appendages that can be folded inwards or extended outwards. The reason? I honestly don’t know. The practicality? Well, with enough practice, the appendages could be used as tables, or even armrests/backrest.
If I told you to think of a stool inspired by a toadstool, chances are you absolutely would’ve never come up with something like this. This aesthetic is so alien and foreign to furniture design, it might just spark a new design movement. Think utilitarian, highly engineered office furniture but on steroids. There’s no cushioning, no fancy ergonomics. Just function and futuristic-form.
Designer: Seongmin Kim
The chair is made using a series of metal plates screwed together, with hinges to enable the moving action, and sandblasted acrylic plates for that matte aesthetic appeal. “I think the small limitation of crafts is that they are based on practicality,” Kim says. Practicality and maybe indigenous materials, I’d add. You don’t expect a stool to employ such ‘industrial’ materials, but once you try and imagine a chair made from metal plates and acrylic, a DNA quite similar to the Toadstool tends to form.
The chair’s unsettlingly beautiful arms are easily its most alluring feature. Keep them down if you want the toadstool to feel ‘shy’, or unfold them if you’re looking to have your furniture make a statement. Each arm is dual-hinged, and features three flaps that have the appeal of ‘fingers’, but work in a functional way. Keep the flaps horizontal and you’ve got a wider table surface. Fold them upwards and the smaller table has a lip around the edge, preventing things from falling down.
Once could assume that the hinges used on the Toadstool have friction-holding capabilities, which means they’ll retain their shape/position whenever opened or closed. Perfect for when you want to use the arms as a table for keeping light objects like your matcha latte, your phone, power bank, AirPods, notepad, etc. I doubt a laptop would fit on the arms, or even hold its position given how some laptops can weigh upwards of 3.5-4 lbs.
That being said, the closed Toadstool is useful too. Apparently when the arms are folded shut, they can be used to discreetly store items like your phone or wallet… turning the table into a cabinet of sorts. It’s convenient, given that each stool has 8 arms. Fold 4 out for using as tables, keep 4 more folded in to use as hidden cabinets to store bits and bobs.
Unfortunately, the Toadstool doesn’t have a website or a price tag. It’s merely a concept from the mind of a rather quirky designer with an odd blend of sensibilities. I don’t mean that in a bad way at all. I find the Toadstool fascinating. Not just for its function, but also for its form. Like I said, you rarely (if never) hear Cyberpunk and furniture in the same sentence. With how Kim executed his design, maybe we should more often.
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