Furniture & Lighting

The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for making furniture and home decor for every room in the house, including the garage.

Lamp brightens as heated oil melts, clarifies

Lamp brightens as heated oil melts, clarifies

The Slow Glow lamp, by NEXT architects for trendy Dutch design collective Droog, is a really simple, cool idea: The bulb is surrounded by a blob of a low-melting point oil (soya oil) that clarifies as the bulb melts it and thus causes the light to gradually brighten over the course of a couple hours as it is turned on. As you can see, it’s just a cork ring, a lamp kit with a tubular bulb, and a few bits of lab glass. But they want $790 US for it from their online store. Which, by the way, is one of those annoying pages that disables right-clicking. Gonna add this one to my personal re-make pile.

CNC-based “global building system”

CNC-based “global building system”

MAKE subscriber Pierre Grand (France) has developed a CNC-based building system, sort of a Lego set for real-world applications (desks, chairs, tables, loungers, room dividers, etc.). He’s been working with 100kgarages.com and will be showing off some of his Ekkoflex concept models at both Detroit and NY Maker Faires (at the Shopbot booth). Ekkoflex

Beautiful plumbing pipe lamps

Beautiful plumbing pipe lamps

These “Kozo” handmade iron-pipe lamps from Israeli group Demo Design Clinic first appeared on my radar back in early 2009 when Boing Boing blogged about their original model, the kozo1, pictured top left. They were a runaway success, and Kozo has since added many more models. They’ve got a clever trick for building the switch into a faucet handle to match the spot-on DIY aesthetics of the lamp itself. Gareth blogged a pretty sweet remake, minus the fancy switch, by a reader named Boris shortly thereafter.