Most furniture sits in a room without saying much. It fills a corner, does its job, and disappears into the background. Nako Baev’s THE OBJECT 01 is not that kind of furniture. The Amsterdam-based designer set out to build a chair that carries the weight of a spatial statement, something that holds its ground without decoration or apology, and in that specific ambition, the object largely delivers.
THE OBJECT 01 is a 3D-printed lounge chair built from recycled PETG, a plastic more commonly found in water bottles than in furniture workshops. At 20kg, it is lighter than its blocky, slab-heavy proportions suggest, though not exactly something you would reposition on a whim. Its dimensions push it closer in scale to a small architectural fragment than to a typical chair, which is likely the whole point.
Designer:
The construction follows a modular panel system, where each 3D-printed block fits into a sequence designed to cut material waste and keep the overall mass structurally lean. Finished in a cold grey Baev calls “Kyoto Fog,” the chair reads somewhere between concrete and matte stone. In a sparse studio or raw loft, it anchors the space with quiet authority. In a more conventional living room, it would likely dominate in ways not every household would welcome.
What makes THE OBJECT 01 genuinely worth attention is how honestly it exposes its own making. The layer-by-layer texture from the printing process is not hidden or smoothed away; it stays visible across the surface, turning the manufacturing method into part of the visual language. That kind of material honesty is far more common in ceramics or cast concrete than in plastic furniture, and it gives the piece a tactile quality that polished renders simply do not convey.
Baev describes the design as sitting between furniture and sculpture, drawing on minimalist brutalism and a quieter Japanese restraint in equal measure. The emotional reference points are more unusual: the designer cites the atmosphere of Silent Hill and Half-Life, those game environments built from silence and abandoned space, as part of what shaped the object’s mood.
The workflow involved AI assistance across early form studies, structural testing, and design refinement, reducing development time considerably. That footnote is becoming standard across the industry, and it doesn’t add or subtract much here. This process might even become the key to sustainable furniture design, as it can help optimize 3D printing, increase efficiency, and reduce waste in the long run.
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