#HTE

An Architect’s Outside-the-Box Space Saving Furniture Designs

Michael Hilgers runs an eponymous design studio in Berlin. The architect’s specialty is space-saving furniture, which incidentally stands out from the crowd. His Cake Desk features a surprising hidden worksurface:

His Corner Collection of furniture embraces their triangular footprints in unusual ways:

The do-it-all HomeTool cabinet contains a WFH desk, a bar down below, storage up top and a closet in the side:

And the Cobbo bed is ideal for singles living in space-tight studios. The bed not only has a diminutive footprint, but makes the most of it by providing overhead storage. (Because I’m conditioned by lousy commercial flying experiences, I’d always open the bin and expect to find a cowboy hat and a purse hogging up the entire space.)

Hilgers’s website says he doesn’t set out to stand out:

“Michael Hilgers is never interested in inventing a spectacular shape; he is much more inspired by discovering the ‘special in the everyday’.”

“The design methodology of 'pragmatic design’ developed by Hilgers focuses on the (space) problem to be solved:

"With this design principle, the trained carpenter deliberately ignores conventional comparative products that are already available and thus quasi develops a new, individually fitting and above all practical solution on a white sheet of paper. The resulting product appears familiar at first glance, but offers an innovative answer to everyday living problems through its reinterpretation, hidden functions or an amazingly simple construction.”