It was inevitable. Razer has successfully attached Chroma RGB to mice, keyboards, streaming keylights, mousepads, microphones, and probably a stray toaster if you leave it in their California design headquarters long enough (see their history of weird and experimental hardware). So, it was only a matter of time before they targeted the ultimate piece of battle station real estate: your backside.

Meet the Razer Soma Chroma, a wireless RGB gaming chair launching worldwide today, June 25, 2026, for $499.99 (€529.99) at Razer.com.

Do you absolutely need a glowing throne that dynamically syncs with your desktop gameplay? No, of course not. Your skill in Valorant isn't going to magically jump three tiers just because your headrest is radiating neon green. But do we desperately want it anyway? Yes, obviously. It’s Razer, and adding immersive RGB to things we didn't know needed it is exactly why we love them.

The Razer Soma Chroma is the wireless RGB gaming chair your setup did not know it needed. It blends reactive lighting with all‑day comfort and cuts cable clutter entirely thanks to an ultra‑low latency HyperSpeed wireless connection powered by a simple USB‑C power bank. The dual‑density cold‑cured foam seat and built‑in ergonomic lumbar arch keep your posture neutral and your backside relaxed through marathon sessions.View Deal

The light show: Completely wireless RGB immersion

The marquee feature here is the fully integrated, reactive RGB lighting embedded seamlessly into the headrest's shoulder wings. Powered by the venerable Razer Chroma RGB engine, it hooks directly into the Chroma SDK to react in real-time to in-game events across more than 300 integrated titles—including heavy hitters like Fortnite, Valorant, and Cyberpunk 2077. If you aren’t actively gaming, you can cycle through 10 dynamic presets and 16.8 million colors via Razer Synapse to perfectly dictate your setup's vibe.

But here is the genuinely clever bit: it's entirely wireless. Nobody wants to roll their chair over a rigid power cord and accidentally yank a $4,000 gaming rig off their desk. Instead, the Soma Chroma transmits data wirelessly via ultra-low latency Razer HyperSpeed 2.4 GHz for your PC, alongside Bluetooth LE for mobile devices.

To juice the actual LEDs, Razer integrated a tidy storage pocket on the back designed to house a standard external power bank (they recommend a hefty 20,000 mAh or larger unit pushing 20W+ and PD 2.0+) via an included 200 mm USB-C cable. If you don't care about a clean, wire-free aesthetic, you can also just run it straight to a wall adapter. There’s even a built-in control panel directly on the edge of the seat base to let you tweak brightness, cycle effects, or switch wireless inputs on the fly without opening an app.

Comfort Check: Saving our posteriors from the Iskur V2

When Razer dropped the original Iskur, it blew us away with an aggressive, mechanical piston-powered lumbar support system. The premium Iskur V2 doubled down on that adaptive lumbar tech, earning massive praise for back health—but it also brought a punishingly firm seat pan. Meanwhile, the mid-range Iskur V2 X ($299) offered a much softer high-density foam seat but stripped out the adjustable lumbar support completely.

The Soma Chroma chart-corrects here with a brand-new Dual-Density Cold-Cured Foam Seat Cushion. It utilizes two distinct layers working in tandem: a softer upper layer that contours snugly to your body, sitting atop a firmer base layer that maintains its structural integrity over time. The goal is to keep the seat from collapsing or hardening prematurely during marathon sessions while actually offering plush, pressure-relieving comfort.

For back health, Razer ditched the complex, dial-driven mechanical pieces of the Iskur series in favor of a Built-In Ergonomic Lumbar Arch. It's a static, contoured support curve integrated directly into the backrest. While you lose the active left-and-right swiveling of the Iskur V2, you get a reliable curve that won’t shift out of place like a loose lumbar pillow.

Where the features got trimmed

To hit that $499.99 sweet spot while packing custom diffusers, a wireless control module, and a built-in control panel, Razer did have to make a few expected concessions:

• 2D Armrests: The Soma Chroma features basic 2D armrests limited strictly to height and swivel adjustments, a noticeable step down from the highly maneuverable 4D armrests on the Iskur V2 that slide and twist every which way.
• No Built-in Haptics: If you were hoping this would natively integrate the bone-shaking directional haptics of the recently released Razer Freyja gaming cushion, you're out of luck. This is strictly a visual show, though you could easily strap a Freyja onto it if you want the ultimate rumble-and-glow cocktail (and I'll probably do that, since I have one of those).

On the mechanical side, it remains a total tank. You get a reinforced steel frame, a 5-star powder-coated steel wheelbase, a Class 4 gas lift, and premium 6 cm PU caster wheels—the latter being a massive upgrade over the friction-heavy plastic wheels that held back the Iskur V2. It reclines up to 155° with a butterfly tilt mechanism, safely supports up to 150 kg (331 lbs), and comfortably accommodates gamers up to 6'6".

Our review unit just arrived!

The shining throne literally just rolled through our doors. We'll be assembling it, unboxing our beefiest power banks, and seeing if the dual-density foam can truly save our glutes during late-night gaming sessions.

Stay tuned for our full, deep-dive review coming shortly (and you'll be able to see it on future Windows Central Podcasts).

The Razer Soma Chroma is the wireless RGB gaming chair your setup did not know it needed. It blends reactive lighting with all‑day comfort and cuts cable clutter entirely thanks to an ultra‑low latency HyperSpeed wireless connection powered by a simple USB‑C power bank. The dual‑density cold‑cured foam seat and built‑in ergonomic lumbar arch keep your posture neutral and your backside relaxed through marathon sessions.View Deal

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Most chairs are built on compromise. You stack the legs, screw the seat, bolt the back, and somewhere in that assembly, a little bit of the original idea gets lost to the necessity of structure. Davide Bozzo’s ZERO Chair refuses to play that game entirely.

The concept is almost confrontationally simple: one single ribbon of metal, bent and curved into a complete chair. No welds holding two pieces together. No joints disguised under upholstery. No hardware quietly doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes. Just one continuous piece of material pushed into a form that includes the base, the cantilevered seat, and the backrest all at once. The name isn’t branding. It’s a philosophy.

Designer: Davide Bozzo

Looking at the photographs, the first thing I kept circling back to was the sheer audacity of the backrest. It doesn’t connect to the base through hidden brackets or clever joinery. It simply rises from the same ribbon, curving upward and backward in a motion that looks more like a wave caught mid-break than anything you’d typically call furniture. It’s graceful in a way that makes you slightly suspicious of it. How is this thing holding anyone’s weight?

The answer lies in what Bozzo describes as structural tension. Form doesn’t just follow function here. It is the function. The material itself carries the engineering logic. Every curve has a reason, and every bend is calculated to distribute load through the continuity of the form rather than through added components. It’s the same principle behind suspension bridge cables or the way a curved shell is structurally stronger than a flat panel. Applied to a chair, it feels almost radical.

I’ll be honest. My first instinct was skepticism. A single-piece metal chair sounds like one of those design school exercises that makes for great renderings but falls apart under real scrutiny. But looking at the close-up photographs, especially the one capturing the S-curve where the seat meets the backrest, you start to believe it. The brushed metal finish shows actual material depth and actual intentionality in how the surface was treated. This isn’t a concept render floating in a void. It has weight and presence.

That said, I do have questions. Comfort is conspicuously absent from the conversation. Metal, even beautifully formed metal, is hard. The cantilevered seat gives some flexibility, which should help, but a chair without cushioning asks something significant of the person sitting in it. Bozzo’s design makes a statement about material honesty and structural purity, which I respect deeply, but at some point a chair has to be sat in. That’s the tension that makes it interesting rather than just pretty.

The piece also reads as a quiet counterargument to the current era of maximalist furniture. We’ve spent years surrounded by bouclé armchairs, curved velvet sofas, and furniture dressed up in layers of texture and warmth. Bozzo’s chair strips all of that away and asks whether furniture can earn your attention through restraint and engineering alone. My honest opinion? It can. Whether it earns a place in your living room is a different question entirely.

The chair also does something that doesn’t get discussed enough in design coverage: it makes the negative space part of the design. The open rectangle formed by the base creates a void that’s almost as deliberate as the metal itself. In the lifestyle image set against a Japanese garden backdrop, that void frames the gravel and ground beyond it. The chair becomes a viewfinder. That’s not accidental. That’s a designer who understands that what you leave out is just as powerful as what you put in.

Bozzo has been building a reputation for material-forward work. His stainless steel pet bowl Dune explored similar ideas around fluid curves in a single medium, but the ZERO Chair feels like a significant step up in ambition. It’s the kind of piece that stops you mid-scroll, makes you set your phone down, and actually think. That, more than any material specification, is probably the point.

The post The ZERO Chair Has No Welds, No Joints, No Apologies first appeared on Yanko Design.

Most upcycling projects ask you to forget what something used to be. Omri Piko Kahan’s bike frame chairs ask the opposite. The geometry is still unmistakably a bicycle frame, the head tube, the top tube, the triangulated rear triangle, all of it present and accounted for, just oriented sideways and asked to hold a person instead of propel one. Kahan, an industrial designer based in Israel, builds lounge chairs from pairs of retired frames, and the whole point is that the donor material remains fully readable, repurposed without being disguised.

Structurally, the approach is clean and considered. Each frame pair is positioned symmetrically, fork and chainstay ends touching the floor as legs, the top tube running horizontally as an armrest. A slung seat and backrest in leather or canvas complete the form. The result has the relaxed posture of a Barcelona chair and the material honesty of something that was clearly built, not styled.

Designer: Omri Piko Kahan

Bicycle frames are absurdly overbuilt for what Kahan is asking them to do. A modern aluminum road frame is engineered to survive repeated impact loads from a rider pushing 300 watts through rough tarmac, and it does that while weighing somewhere between 1,000 and 1,400 grams. The structural surplus in that kind of engineering is enormous, which is why two of them positioned as a chair frame and asked to support a seated adult is, from a load-bearing standpoint, almost comically within spec. The geometry does the rest. Bicycle frames already resolve forces through triangulated sections, and a lounge chair asks for exactly that kind of lateral and compressive stability.

What Kahan has figured out is the orientation problem. Flip a frame on its side and the existing tube angles don’t automatically produce a useful chair geometry. The fork legs and chainstay ends need to hit the floor at the right height relative to each other, the top tube needs to land at armrest height, and the whole thing needs to produce a seat rake that doesn’t pitch you forward or swallow you whole. The matched top tube angles across both frames in the Cube and Trek build suggest this took real iteration, because they align with a precision that reads as deliberate rather than lucky. Filed fillets at the junctions and a custom setback upper support holding the sling confirm someone was paying close attention to finish quality.

The two builds photographed so far, one pairing a blue Cube road frame with a Trek, another combining a GT Transeo 3.0 with what appears to be a Supreme-branded MTB frame, show how much the donor bikes drive the final character of each piece. The GT build in particular has a longer wheelbase geometry that gives the chair a wider, more reclined stance than the Cube version. Kahan is taking custom orders, with pricing worked out per commission, which makes sense given that no two donor frame combinations will produce the same structural or ergonomic outcome.

The post These Old Bike Frames Upcycled Into Armchairs Are The Coolest Thing You’ll See Today first appeared on Yanko Design.

At a time when living spaces are shrinking while expectations from them continue to expand, this design presents a thoughtful response that is both rooted in tradition and aligned with contemporary needs.

Emerging from the context of rising housing pressures in Taiwan, where compact homes are increasingly becoming the norm, the project addresses a fundamental question: how can furniture adapt to limited space without compromising comfort or experience? Rather than treating furniture as static, single-purpose objects, the designer reimagines them as dynamic systems capable of transformation.

Designer: Che-Chia Hsu

At the heart of this piece lies a deep engagement with traditional Chinese woodworking techniques, particularly the precision of tenon joints. These joints move beyond being structural solutions and become expressions of calculated craftsmanship, where geometry, material behavior, and human interaction converge. The result is a construction that feels both minimal and robust, relying on accuracy instead of excess.

The furniture set is designed to integrate storage and seating within a compact footprint. A chair is concealed within the table and can be pulled out, unfolded, and expanded into a functional seat. The process is intuitive: the chair is extracted, the seat and backrest are opened, and the backrest angle is adjusted using velcro. The transformation is smooth and unobtrusive, allowing the object to shift roles effortlessly.

What distinguishes this design is its reliance on the user’s own body as part of the structural system. Instead of depending entirely on rigid supports, the chair uses the tension generated by the sitter to stabilize the backrest. This introduces a subtle interaction between user and object, where the act of sitting becomes integral to how the design performs. The experience feels efficient, responsive, and quietly intelligent.

Material choices reinforce this balance between function and experience. Lightweight pine wood panels provide durability while ensuring ease of movement. Paired with gray cotton linen fabric, the design introduces a tactile softness that enhances comfort. The fabric is breathable and visually understated, complementing the natural warmth of the wood. Together, these materials create a calm, cohesive aesthetic suited to contemporary interiors.

The development of the project reflects a layered and rigorous process. The designer began by studying traditional joinery techniques through literature, followed by hands-on training under a woodcraft master. This immersion enabled a deeper understanding of the craft beyond theory. Building on this foundation, the designer explored ways to translate these techniques into a modern, functional context through research and experimentation.

What emerges is a design that treats constraint as a starting point rather than a limitation. The piece brings together traditional knowledge and contemporary living patterns, shaping an object that adapts, responds, and participates in everyday use. It reflects a way of designing where space, material, and human interaction are considered together, resulting in furniture that feels considered, purposeful, and in tune with the realities of modern living.

The post A Transforming Table-Chair That Turns Tradition into Space-Saving Intelligence first appeared on Yanko Design.

Most public art earns its place on a pedestal and stays there. It asks you to look, maybe photograph it, and walk away. The relationship between viewer and work rarely extends beyond that brief transaction. That’s been the convention for a long time, but there’s a growing push for installations that don’t just occupy public space but actually do something within it.

Michael Jantzen has been exploring that tension for years. His Moving Furniture series applies a simple idea to ordinary chairs and tables: take each object’s form and repeat it in progressive intervals as if capturing it mid-movement, then connect those moments into a single piece. The result is something you can still sit in or set a drink on, even if it no longer looks quite built for that.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

Monumental Moving Furniture takes that same concept into architectural territory. Built from painted steel, the series consists of abstracted chair and table forms, each generated by moving the original object through space and time and locking its path into a chain of connected segments. At this scale, what started as a reference to everyday objects feels closer to a building than a piece of furniture.

The method behind each piece is consistent. A chair or table is set in motion through space and time, with each interval frozen and joined to the next. Some pieces move only part of the original form; others shift the whole thing. The result is a structure that stops belonging to any single discipline and starts reading as furniture, sculpture, and architecture at once.

Despite being too large to sit in, these sculptures aren’t purely decorative. Each is large enough to walk under and through, giving it a practical function as a pavilion and shelter. That’s not something most public art can claim. Instead of asking people to observe from a polite distance, these structures pull you in, turning a passive encounter into something more physical and immediate.

The series covers both chair forms and table forms, each treated with the same sequential abstraction. Individual pieces have also been grouped into configurations that suggest more complex structures, as if each were a building block for something larger. Painted in vivid, solid colors like white, orange, and yellow, each structure commands attention from a distance and rewards a closer look once you’re standing beneath it.

Public spaces deserve more than objects to look at. They deserve things to experience. Monumental Moving Furniture earns its place on both counts, offering structures large enough to shelter visitors while giving them something genuinely puzzling to engage with. These forms don’t demand reverence. They invite curiosity, exploration, and the kind of slow, circling attention that good public space has always been designed to encourage.

The post These Steel Chairs Are Too Big to Sit In: Walk Through Them Instead first appeared on Yanko Design.

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.

Secretlab's new $49 lockable casters bring a much-needed flexibility fix to the TITAN Evo, though XL model owners are still being left behind.

Flexispot's C7 Morpher is a premium office chair with advanced adjustments, an ergonomic design, and comfortable materials to get you cozy for work or gaming.