Image via Loose Parts
The love of IKEA is well-documented and for good reason—the firm has come up with countless innovative designs, and the magic of a fully-formed furniture piece springing up from a totally flat package is akin to modern wonder.
However, it’s often a less-than-ideal fate for these furniture pieces when they reach their end-of-life: landfill. Only recently has IKEA begun to pioneer a buyback service, but it will take time for the program to roll out to a wider audience.
The good news is that there are alternatives that might make this process a little easier, and at a reduced cost to the environment. Furniture brand Loose Parts has debuted the Original Assembly Kit (OAK), which is essentially a grown-up, furniture-based version of LEGO.
Image via Loose Parts
This modular furniture kit includes eight steel shelves, 32 solid-wood rails with holes drilled at a few inches’ intervals for fasteners, two metal hanging rods, and, of course, steel fasteners. And all you’ll need to put furniture together? An Allen wrench.
With these elements, each kit comes with enough pieces to make one large piece of furniture, something along the lines of a garment rack or a bookshelf. Or smaller pieces, like side tables, can be made two of.
Image via Loose Parts
The beauty of it is that if one fine day you wake up and decide that those two end tables are just collecting dust in the living room and you actually would like a bookshelf for the steadily-growing, still-unread books on the bedroom floor, the pieces can be taken apart and elements reused again.
And in the case of moving house, it can all be taken down and reassembled with ease later on—that’s what it was made to do, after all. What might’ve been a console in the old house could be built as a rack of shelves in the next.
Image via Loose Parts
Founder Jennifer June tells Curbed that the inspiration for this design came from the Theory of Loose Parts by Simon Nicholson. This is a concept that prioritizes play and creativity over static experiences that don’t have much variation to them.
“In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it,” Nicholson wrote in 1971, cited by the furniture design firm.
Image via Loose Parts
It also stemmed from the way the pandemic saw businesses needing to adapt their interiors to ever-changing health guidelines and new rules. The uncertainty of the times makes this “non-committal” relationship with furniture a lot easier to stomach over a heavy investment into static pieces.
Wood used in Loose Parts’ products are chosen with a heavy preference for FSC-certified material, and materials remain single-origin as much as possible. Natural latex, horsehair, and cotton batting are used in upholstered materials instead of foam, eliminating petroleum as well.
Image via Loose Parts
Smaller parts of the OAK, which runs US$4,180 in its entirety, are also available. Some forms take the OAK Small Table for US1,130, and the OAK Display Shelf for US$2,980.
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[via Curbed, all images via Loose Parts]