Star Bamboo Singapore

This has got to be the Coolest Chair in the World.

Check out the “Flexible Love”, an accordion folding chair made from recycled wood and paper:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aQxEEi7I0Q]

A translation for those who don’t understand Mandarin: Hello, this is “Flexible Love”, an expandable lover’s chair. It can seat 1, 4, 8 or even 16 people! It has also many different designs – “S” shape, “U” shape, and lastly the round shape. This is “Flexible Love”.

“Flexible Love” is the name of an amazing piece of furniture design. You can change the size and design instantly with a simple tug.

It’s been generating buzz on the Internet for a while now, before I stumbled upon it.

I simply love it.

The designer is a young Taiwanese college student, who was inspired by the honeycomb structure used in paper pallets. It doesn’t look very comfortable to my eye, but it’s strong enough to take the weight of 16 people.

With a retail price tag of US$799 prices ranging from US$300 to US$540, these were never going to sell in large volumes. Why would people pay a premium for furniture made from “widely-available, low-cost recycled materials”?

Indeed, Flexible Love is envisaged to be a line of “experimental furniture”.

Such fresh designs are great for generating interest and awareness in use of eco-friendly materials in furniture production.

And it has accomplished that wonderfully.

Update (3 May 2007): A reader alerted me (thanks Marc!) to a Canadian design company Molo Design, which has an entire range of flexible products. They’re not eco-friendly, but are at least recyclable. This probably provided the inspiration for Flexible Love, but hey, don’t we all borrow ideas from one another?

Update (8 May 2007): Pinzaan, the company behind Flexible Love, alerted me that the prices for their Flexible Love series are actually more affordable than I had thought. The original link in my blog wasn’t an authorised Flexible Love reseller, which explains why they couldn’t get their grubby hands on it!