#HTE

New York-based Feather is putting a modern (and mid-century modern) twist on furniture rental, aimed squarely at millennials who are in transitional periods of life.

The Y Combinator startup acts in the vein of other furniture rental companies, like CORT, but, you know, makes it fashion. Feather posits itself as an option for people in liminal situations, like those “looking ahead to a semester of school” or “testing out a city [but] not ready to commit to staying,” and appeals to fans of brands like West Elm with sleek, modern options.

The overall aesthetic of its options appears to be the biggest differentiator (think: trendy copper accents, Eames-inspired chairs, and Eiffel bases everywhere) with…

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#HTE

New York-based Feather is putting a modern (and mid-century modern) twist on furniture rental, aimed squarely at millennials who are in transitional periods of life.

The Y Combinator startup acts in the vein of other furniture rental companies, like CORT, but, you know, makes it fashion. Feather posits itself as an option for people in liminal situations, like those “looking ahead to a semester of school” or “testing out a city [but] not ready to commit to staying,” and appeals to fans of brands like West Elm with sleek, modern options.

The overall aesthetic of its options appears to be the biggest differentiator (think: trendy copper accents, Eames-inspired chairs, and Eiffel bases everywhere) with…

Continue reading…

#HTE

Construction is underway at the new Apple store in downtown Chicago, and today, as reported by DNA Chicago, a new design element was added — a giant Apple logo. A construction crew laid out the logo on the store’s silver, rectangular roof, making it look like a giant MacBook. It stayed for less than an hour before crews rolled up the logo and removed it.

Designed by London-based Foster+Partners, the store is a relocation of Apple’s original Chicago flagship and is a 20,000-square-foot space which, upon completion, will have all-glass walls and a thin, carbon fiber roof… that looks like a MacBook.

The first renderings were originally unveiled in 2015, and touted the project’s “echo” to Prairie Style homes. As the Chicago Tribune…

Continue reading…

#HTE

Construction is underway at the new Apple store in downtown Chicago, and today, as reported by DNA Chicago, a new design element was added — a giant Apple logo. A construction crew laid out the logo on the store’s silver, rectangular roof, making it look like a giant MacBook. It stayed for less than an hour before crews rolled up the logo and removed it.

Designed by London-based Foster+Partners, the store is a relocation of Apple’s original Chicago flagship and is a 20,000-square-foot space which, upon completion, will have all-glass walls and a thin, carbon fiber roof… that looks like a MacBook.

The first renderings were originally unveiled in 2015, and touted the project’s “echo” to Prairie Style homes. As the Chicago Tribune…

Continue reading…

#HTE

You’re hot. Your partner is cold. It’s a classic story: one of you throws offthe blankets in the middle of the night while the other is burrowed within them. But it defeats the point of sleeping next to your person — if you’re spooning through a duvet, you might as well hug a body pillow.

SmartDuvet, the company that first launched a self-making bed on Kickstarter, is now offering a second edition that lets two people adjust their preferred temperatures on their side of the bed. The SmartDuvet Breeze, like its predecessor, is basically a blow-up air-blanket you put on your duvet, inside your duvet cover. (Do you have a duvet cover? I don’t. Should I have a duvet cover?) It attaches to a control box, which you might be able to hide under…

Continue reading…

#HTE

You’re hot. Your partner is cold. It’s a classic story: one of you throws offthe blankets in the middle of the night while the other is burrowed within them. But it defeats the point of sleeping next to your person — if you’re spooning through a duvet, you might as well hug a body pillow.

SmartDuvet, the company that first launched a self-making bed on Kickstarter, is now offering a second edition that lets two people adjust their preferred temperatures on their side of the bed. The SmartDuvet Breeze, like its predecessor, is basically a blow-up air-blanket you put on your duvet, inside your duvet cover. (Do you have a duvet cover? I don’t. Should I have a duvet cover?) It attaches to a control box, which you might be able to hide under…

Continue reading…

#HTE

Samsara luggage is betting that the current crop of smart suitcase buyers are more interested in design upgrades than additional (and sometimes unneeded) integrated tech features. Its premiere product is currently 5x overfunded on Kickstarter, and is primarily hype-worthy not for its tech, but for its design and what it’s made of: aluminum alloy.

Aluminum suitcases, while more expensive than hard-top alternatives in other materials, boast a number of advantages, including durability. Samsara’s not only the first to create a smart aluminum alloy suitcase, but with a price tag of $690, it’s cheaper than most selections from other brands. (For comparison, Rimowa’s similarly sized aluminum Topas is selling for $746.25 with no integrated…

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#HTE

This is the Green4U Panoz Racing GT-EV, and while it might look like a giant BattleBot, it’s actually a new all-electric racecar that could run in the 24 Hours of Le Mans — next year, that is.

The GT-EV was created by Don Panoz, a guy with a predilection for racing weird cars. He developed a hybrid endurance racecar in the late 1990s before hybrid racecars were a thing, and he was one of the instrumental figures in bringing the arrow-shaped DeltaWing — which has a long, strange history of its own — to Le Mans in 2012.

The car debuted today in France in the run-up to this weekend’s 24 Hours of Le Mans, and it’s certainly a head-turner — especially in that bright green. It looks much better on…

Continue reading…

#HTE

This is the Green4U Panoz Racing GT-EV, and while it might look like a giant BattleBot, it’s actually a new all-electric racecar that could run in the 24 Hours of Le Mans — next year, that is.

The GT-EV was created by Don Panoz, a guy with a predilection for racing weird cars. He developed a hybrid endurance racecar in the late 1990s before hybrid racecars were a thing, and he was one of the instrumental figures in bringing the arrow-shaped DeltaWing — which has a long, strange history of its own — to Le Mans in 2012.

The car debuted today in France in the run-up to this weekend’s 24 Hours of Le Mans, and it’s certainly a head-turner — especially in that bright green. It looks much better on…

Continue reading…

#HTE

Herman Miller, the furniture brand behind iconic designs like the Aeron chair, has teamed up with designer Yves Béhar for a new suite of smart office furniture launching today at NeoCon in Chicago. Named Live OS (yawn), the system uses sensors that can come preinstalled with Herman Miller desks, or retrofitted to any existing work surface. The sensors collect on-the-fly anonymized data which is then accessed through a dashboard, giving companies insight into how spaces are being utilized.

On fixed-height desks, Live OS only tracks when people are present, but when used with Herman Miller’s sit-to-stand desks, it acts more like a furniture Fitbit. Through an app, people set preferences for things like desk height, which can then be…

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