This year, I got to speak to another member of the team behind EcoSystems, Matt Tyson, about the new items they unveiled.
Their new concept, Snug-It, is so simple and so ingenious. It's basically a kit of brackets that allows you to create just about any piece of furniture you might need.
Figure out whether you want a desk, bookshelves, entertainment center, whatever, or any combination of the above that you could possibly imagine. Get the brackets and go to Home Depot, have the plywood cut into the shapes and sizes you need, and just fit the whole thing together. Quick, cheap, easy, adaptable, perfect.
Tyson told me they're discussing selling the kits along with the pre-cut plywood for the more standard pieces like the desk, and also giving the brackets squared-off slots to avoid the need for a router. When we started talking about being able to find pieces of wood out on the street and turning them into furniture, I got more excited about this, for some reason. For one thing, Snug-It is a heck of a lot nicer than throwing an old door onto a couple of sawhorses, but allows for the reuse of materials and the satisfaction of not needlessly chopping down more trees. Then I started imagining those wonderful swirling patterns of color you get when you sand down a piece of old wood that's been painted fifty times over the years (uncovering lead-based paint notwithstanding). I love all the possibilities of this.
The other new piece of theirs is their "Bada" table:
That's a generously sized table for entertaining, but it can be shortened for normal day-to-day needs, saving valuable space:
But the best thing is that, after dinner, it turns into a loveseat:
You can see another configuration for Snug-It in the background. Unless you live in a studio apartment or have guests sleeping over every other day, I consider Bada to be far more practically useful than a sofabed. Both a table and loveseat one could conceivably use every day, unlike a sofabed, which most of us presumably wouldn't use more than once a month at the most. Even if you do have enough room for two single-use pieces of furniture, this is a much better use of resources, and I'm in full support of that.
©2009, Ryan Witte
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