Most upholstered furniture is essentially furniture under stress. Fabric gets stretched, stapled, pulled taut, and forced into submission over rigid frames. It is, fundamentally, a question of control. Danish designer Lærke Ryom looked at that process and decided to do the opposite. Her debut solo exhibition, Raiments, now open at Innenkreis gallery in central Copenhagen, is built entirely around that single act of refusal.

The collection includes a daybed, a chair, a bench, table lamps, a floor lamp, and wall lamps, all presented in soothing cream and chocolate-brown hues. The palette is calm and considered, which makes sense. These are pieces that ask you to slow down and look closely, because the detail is where the story actually lives.

Designer: Laerke Ryom

The daybed is probably the clearest expression of the concept. Long, low, and dressed in Kvadrat wool with visible quilting stitches running across its surface, it reads more like a made bed than a piece of showroom furniture. The fabric is not pulled over the form but rather allowed to settle onto it, the way a well-cut linen drapes over a body. The powder-coated steel frame beneath does its structural job quietly, without announcing itself.

The bench follows a similar logic. Compact and precise, it carries the same quilted wool surface and the same twill weave edge banding that appears across the collection. That edge band is a detail worth pausing on. Ryom chose it specifically because twill weave is a technique rooted in clothing and home textiles rather than furniture. “It places the upholstery pieces somewhere in between,” she has said, “adding to the feeling of a tailored piece rather than upholstery.” It is a small choice with a large effect on how the finished object feels.

The chair, built on an aluminium frame rather than steel, is the lightest piece structurally, and it shows. It sits with a kind of ease that heavier upholstered chairs rarely manage. The wool covers it without gripping it, and the stitching adds just enough surface interest to reward a second look without demanding one.

The lighting pieces are where the tailoring metaphor gets genuinely interesting. The floor lamp and table lamps, both on powder-coated steel bases, incorporate fabric shades that are constructed the same way as the seating pieces, draped and stitched rather than stretched and glued. The wall lamps, built on stainless steel bases, carry the same approach. Seeing the textile treatment applied to lighting as well as furniture makes the collection feel like a genuine system of thinking rather than a one-off experiment. Ryom is not just applying a technique to a single object type. She is testing a philosophy across an entire interior.

Underlying all of it is a material choice that matters. The Kvadrat wool she selected deliberately lacks visible weaving, which gives the stitching room to become the primary surface detail. The quilting is not decorative in a fussy sense. It is structural and honest, doing exactly what it appears to do, which is hold the fabric in place without adhesives or staples. The result is upholstery that can be disassembled, repaired, and eventually recycled. The clothes metaphor is not just aesthetic. It is practical in the most direct way possible.

Ryom, born in 1995 and working out of The Factory for Art and Design in Copenhagen’s Amager district, has been exploring alternative upholstery techniques for several years. Raiments feels like the point where that exploration becomes a fully formed position. The pieces are not minimal for the sake of it. They are restrained because restraint is what the concept requires. Every choice, from the aluminium chair frame to the stainless steel wall lamp bases to the twill edge banding, is in service of the same idea: that furniture should be dressed, not wrestled.

Whether or not that idea changes how people think about upholstery at large is probably too early to say. But Ryom has made a collection that is hard to look at and then go back to thinking about furniture the old way. That, for a debut solo show, is more than enough. Raiments is on show at Innenkreis, Herluf Trolles Gade 28, Copenhagen, through 23 May.

The post Forget Upholstery: Lærke Ryom Tailors Furniture Instead first appeared on Yanko Design.

The interiors most people aspire to these days tend to share a common trait: they’re clean, restrained, and almost aggressively neutral. Scandinavian minimalism, Japandi aesthetics, and muted palettes have dominated home design for years, and while there’s nothing wrong with a well-curated beige room, a lot of modern spaces have started to feel emotionally flat, like showrooms rather than places where people actually live.

That’s where the Caramel collection comes in. Designed by Moscow-based product designer Maxim Tatarintsev in collaboration with Russian brand Svoy Design, this new series of ceramic lighting and furniture takes a very different approach to interior objects. Rather than adding another understated piece to a polished shelf, it reaches back to a simpler, sweeter time, asking whether a lamp or a side table can carry something as intangible as joy.

Designer: Maxim Tatarintsev

Tatarintsev’s inspiration came from a period of deep personal reflection. Amid what he describes as the noise of contemporary life, he looked inward and found his answer in childhood, specifically in the candy that practically every kid growing up in the 90s and early 2000s would recognize. That small, glossy, jewel-toned caramel sweet became both his muse and his design vocabulary, shaping everything from the forms to the color palette.

The collection spans pendant lights, ceiling fixtures, and wall-mounted lamps, all crafted from semi-porcelain, as well as a low-profile side table made from a proprietary composite material. What stands out is the modular approach: each ceramic unit can be combined and reconfigured, letting you stack or cluster them into different lighting arrangements depending on the mood or corner of the room you’re working with.

Think of it like assembling your own arrangement from a jar of sweets. One configuration might call for a single pendant above a kitchen island; another might cluster a few units along the ceiling of a reading nook. The point isn’t to follow a prescribed layout but to put that creative decision in the hands of the person actually living in the space, not just the designer who furnished it.

The craftsmanship behind the lighting is traditional and deliberate. Each piece starts as a slip-cast semi-porcelain form, drying for several days before being fired at 1,100°C inside a muffle furnace. A coat of glaze and paint follows, giving the finished modules their signature smooth, candy-like sheen. It’s a fairly labor-intensive process for what might look like a simple geometric shape, but that’s precisely what gives each piece its quiet depth.

The side table takes a different manufacturing route altogether. Made from a proprietary composite rather than ceramic, it’s significantly more durable and comes in two versions, one for indoor use and one for covered outdoor settings. At first glance, it reads as a low, rounded ottoman, and people will probably be unable to resist using it as a delicious seat instead.

None of that is accidental. Tatarintsev’s stated goal wasn’t to produce pretty objects but to create what he calls “emotional anchors,” pieces capable of sparking a genuine reaction in whoever encounters them. A set of lamps you can rearrange on a whim, a table that moonlights as a seat, and a color palette borrowed from childhood treats make for a collection that gives any room a personality it actually earned.

The post These Ceramic Lamps Look Like 90s Caramel Candy and Stack Any Way first appeared on Yanko Design.