There’s nothing more mind blowing than a good optical illusion. But while a lot of them exist in 2D, some designers have worked tirelessly to turn the unbelievable patterns into seriously phenomenal furniture. From creating incredible looking chairs and strange storage units, to bringing impossible rugs and super trippy tables to life! Let's check out some amazing furniture that’ll make you look twice!
Legless Bar Stool
Imagine you walk up to a bar and pull out a stool to sit on. But, as you reach for the nearest leg, your hand moves straight through it! What witchcraft is this? Don’t worry, magic isn’t real; This is just the Legless Bar Stool designed by Josh Carmody.
At the right angle, the four corners of the seat look like they’re supported by a leg. But a carefully constructed trident of timber at its base allows it to balance on just three legs while supporting the weight of anyone brave enough to it on it. However, at an extortionate $1,180 per stool, you'd probably want a stool to have at least 4 legs!
Pinetti Wine Rack
Some people are great at making a bottle of wine disappear. But this next piece of furniture takes this supreme skill to another level, and without ever opening the bottle. This is the Pinetti Wine rack, and as you can see (or technically, as you can’t see), it makes any wine bottle placed inside disappear!
Harlequin Illusions Pinetti Optical Illusion Wine Rack by OddityMall If you look closely at the design, you can see there’s a very small seam running diagonally along the middle strut. This is where the rack’s designers, Harlequin Illusions, have cleverly placed a slim mirror. The angle of the mirror reflects the bottom half of the rack, which matches the back panel, making it look like the middle is empty. That’s so smart that Harlequin Illusions have patented the design to stop anyone from copying them. Maybe we'll need to stick to the old-fashioned way of making wine disappear.
Cuboid Table
It’s not often that a piece of furniture flaunts the rules of physics, logic, or gravity, but from the right angle, this table appears to defy all three! Looking at this cuboid table, created by master craftsman Ricardo Churchill, from the corner, the entire structure seems endless while it’s also floating!
The reality though is that the top, bottom, and sides of the cuboid have all been welded together in such a way that the table balances perfectly while only connecting at one of the corners. The result is something that looks like a 2D illusion which you can also rest a cup of coffee on. How genius is that?
The 90° Vase: The Impossible Triangle
When it comes to impossibly endless designs, there’s one home accessory that takes it to a brain-breaking new level. The 90° Vase, developed by Cuatro Cuatros design studio, is based on the design of the Penrose triangle, also aptly named The Impossible Triangle.
In 2D, the design plays with the orientation of each beam, twisting them into an impossible formation that can’t exist in reality. If that’s the case, how does this vase exist? It turns out that this is another design that relies on the power of perception, because if you take a step back, you can see how it works. The body of the vase is angled to look like the top and bottom connect, even though they’re 90° apart, allowing the shadows to create the illusion that the structure is somehow whole.
As surprisingly simple as it looks, this vase isn’t cheap at €285, roughly $340! That’s a lot of money for a vase that only blows your mind from one angle!
Cut Chair
All perceptions aside, there’s some furniture that looks impossible no matter what angle you stare at it from, like the “Cut Chair” from Peter Bristol. It looks like the chair below lost a fight to an angry samurai!
But despite having several diagonal slices missing from three of its four legs, the chair still sits upright. Not only that, but it can also support the full weight of someone sitting or standing on it. So, without magic, how exactly does this chair work? The answer isn’t actually in the chair, but in the mat below it. Beneath the wool rug is a cleverly concealed steel plate which turns the entire design into a cantilever seat. This design counterweights any force applied to the chair, allowing it to remain upright on just one visible leg. It’d be pretty funny to host a dinner party and invite your guests to sit on a set of these. Their looks of clear-cut confusion would be priceless! But this would be one seriously expensive practical joke, because at an astonishing $5000 each, this steely seat illusion certainly isn’t a cheap trick!
Samurai Chair
And the “Cut Chair” isn’t the only seat that seems to have had a run in with a slick-sworded Samurai! As its name suggests, the Samurai Chair seems to have been sliced up by some sort of chair-hating swordsman.
However, it too is just an optical illusion. Designed by Korean visionary Seo Young Moon, the four sliced legs may look ready to topple, but the chair can actually support up to 330 lbs! At a glance, it looks like the chair legs must have been shaved down to those razor-sharp edges from one large block of wood, but a close look reveals cut marks along each of the supposed slices! Seo has yet to reveal exactly how she created
this crafty illusion, but we can certainly speculate. Have they been sliced up and glued back together to appear more realistic? Maybe 4 long steel pins hold each impossible-looking leg in place? Maybe it really was sliced up by a seat-hating Samurai, whose village was slaughtered by a rogue seat many years ago. But after taking his revenge on this lone chair, he felt guilty and tried to put it back together, before wondering the land in eternal search of atonement for his crimes against chair-kind.
Magic Chairs
A lot of mind-boggling furniture relies on wood or steel to establish a strong illusion. But complex designs can also be achieved with a few well-placed sheets of plexiglass, as designer Davide Conti proved with his creatively confusing “Magic Chairs”.
At a glance from the side, these chairs look like their missing a couple of key legs, but they’re standing on their own! It isn’t until you view them head on that you see sheets of transparent plexiglass are what’s really keeping them up! Even though that explains it, you need the nerve to sit on a chair that looks like it relies on magic!
Urban Philosophy Chair
It’s not just Davide Conti’s chairs that play around with transparent partitions, though. Without knowing any better, you'd think that this next chair, built and designed by Nissa Kinzhalina, was just an impossibly balanced black metal frame.
Turning it round twists the slick metal edges until they overlap, making it look more like an art installation than a seat! However, the layers of cleverly clear acrylic that make up this chair are present, providing the perfect structure for the black framework to mess with onlookers minds!
Inception Chair
Here’s a question; what happens when you combine a Russian nesting doll and a chair into one piece of furniture? The answer, is the inception chair created by Vivian Chiu.
From every single angle, this incredible piece of artistry looks like the frame of a chair being repeated into infinity, like it’s been trapped in between two mirrors! However, Chu didn’t break the rules of reality to bring this incredible contraption to life. She designed 10 separate frames with little grooves, each of which allows a slightly smaller frame to slot inside it.
The result is 10 different sized frames that all come apart, but that can be put back together to form one fully functioning seat! Are anyone else’s eyes straining as much as their mind just looking at this thing?
Canvas Fram Shaped Chair
Vivian Chu’s chairs aren’t the only inconceivable seats on the market! I mean, just take a look at the chair below.
While you might be thinking that it's just a picture of a chair, looks can be deceiving. Because even though this is a picture of a chair on a canvas, it also doubles up as an actual chair! This creative collection was made by printing images of a chair, an armchair, and a sofa onto an elasticated canvas. When stretched over a frame and propped at the right angle, they can support someone who needs to sit down.
These multi-functional frames were designed by
YOY studio in Tokyo, Japan. And even though they’re just a frame, some fabric, and paint-printed pictures, their insanely innovative design means that their prices start around $1600 each! Talk about stretching the budget!
Fadeout Chair
Those canvas chairs aren’t the only seats with legs that don’t touch the ground, though! Another Japanese company, called Nendo, made it their mission to design a chair that looked like it was levitating, something they definitely achieved with the “Fadeout Chair”.
It looks like the wood of the legs magically morphs into some sort of transparent glass halfway down! But in reality, all four of the legs are made of clear acrylic and have been painstakingly painted to match the wooden texture of the rest of the seat. The final effect makes it look like the chair is floating, which is oddly unnerving when a bunch of them are put together!
3D Floor Designs
While the sky certainly seems to be the limit for some of these illusions, there’s even more mind-blowing ones that exist on the floor. More specifically, 3D flooring designs. In the world of fancy floors, nothing quite tops a bedroom that looks like it’s perched on a beach, or a bathroom set in an English garden, though it probably wouldn’t smell like one!
Others can even add an element of danger, like the hallway below that leads down to the depths of hell!
But how can they look so realistic? The secret lies in specialist resin. Once the image has been printed and laid down, these designs are covered in a transparent two-component epoxy polymer which gives the image depth. The result is a floor that looks realistically deep from the right angle!
And the technique isn’t just limited to floors. If you use your imagination, you can create a 3D mural anywhere from the base of your stairs, to a whole new world on your walls! Well, that’s guaranteed to make bath time a bit more tropical!
3D Epoxy Floor and walls Bathroom - how to make an 3D Floor, Step by Step Guide - Bathroom Design by Concept Design Solutions Cloud Sofa
Despite what it looks like, this next piece of furniture from D.K. & Wei isn’t an optical illusion.
Called the “Cloud Sofa”, this comfy looking couch concept is designed to float several feet off the floor. But how does it literally levitate? Are there hidden wires? Maybe some invisible supports? No, this thing relies on the power of magnets! The base and sofa conceptually contain super strong, repelling magnets, allowing the structure to float in the air! Although, there’s no specifications detailing how the design locks the sofa in place.
If you’ve ever pushed two opposing magnets together, you know they slide off each other thanks to the spherical shape of their magnetic fields. So how does this couch ensure that anyone who gets on doesn’t slide straight off? Well, it might rely on magnetic levitation technology. Instead of using one big magnet, a series of super strong electromagnets would need to be encased inside that base section. As the magnet in the couch is repelled and begins to slide off, sensors in the base would react to the movement by increasing power in different magnets, balancing the couch out and keeping it from crashing.
But even then, electromagnets strong enough to repel an entire couch wouldn’t be small, so they wouldn’t fit inside such a sleek base component. No wonder this couch is just a concept!On the more possible end of the magnetic furniture spectrum though, there’s a lamp design that looks like its bulb is levitating. But unlike the “Cloud Sofa”, these Gravitas lamps are completely real! Not only that, but the disconnected bulb also lights up, as if by magic!
Gravita Floating Lamp By Floately by Newest Crowdfunding Inventions
So, how exactly does this wireless system work? Well, the lamps use induction, which is where an electromagnet with a current flowing through it can generate a current in another body placed nearby. This process is then combined with magnetism. So, while gravity pulls the lightbulb towards the ground, a magnet with a coil in the cap keeps the lightbulb levitating while the coil itself receives the induced electricity and powers the light! That’s pretty ingenious. And if that wasn’t enough, its wireless induction ability makes it the perfect place to wirelessly charge compatible smartphones as well! I hope the creators of that concept “Cloud Sofa” are taking some notes right now!
Floating Bed
While levitating lamps are cool, they’re not exactly the kind of large floating furniture that the Cloud Sofa got us excited for. For that, we need to look to the Netherlands, where a real floating bed has been developed by inventor Janjaap Ruijssenaars.
Using the power of permanent opposing industrial-strength magnets, the “Floating Bed”, or, more accurately, “Uncomfortable Looking Rectangular Platform”, floats 16 inches above the ground while tethered to the floor by 4 cables. As much as they look like a huge trip hazard, they’re the only thing that stops the bed from sliding off the magnetic force field and crashing into the floor! And like that didn’t sound dangerous enough, back in 2009 the price tag for this
hovering bed started at a wallet-draining €1.2 million, that’s roughly $1.67 million today! But you definitely get your money’s worth, because all that magnetic power can apparently hold up to a whopping 2000 lbs of weight!
Illusion Side Table
This next piece of furniture may look like it’s floating, but there’s not a magnet in sight! The aptly named “Illusion” side table from design company Essey appears to be a tablecloth without the all-essential table underneath!
Made from a 3-millimetre-thick acrylic sheet, the plastic like material has been intricately shaped to mimic the flowing folds of falling fabric. The four corners reach down to the floor, acting as a set of feet, with the robust material making the entire structure surprisingly sturdy. Weighing in at just 6 ½ lbs, this is one seriously lightweight illusion. But costing around $200, it’ll make your wallet a little lighter as well!
Poised Table
If you’re looking for a floating coffee table with a bit more heft to it though, then the “Poised” table designed by Paul Cocksedge might weigh in your favor.
Comprised of a staggering half a ton’s worth of pure steel, the simplistic 20-millimetre-thick metal plate is bent fluidly as if it were a page in a book! But this creative curve doesn’t detract from the fact it can support the weight of a fully grown man on its farthest end without tumbling over! It relies on a series of super precise calculations regarding mass, gravity, and equilibrium, and if it were just a millimeter off, the entire thing would topple. However, Paul hasn’t revealed this amazing math to the public to stop people from ripping off his design. That’s hardly surprising, considering it took him over half a year to correctly calculate!
From the photos though, the bottom section must weigh considerably more than the top. Well, however it works, you just can’t knock that final result, literally!
Tensegrity
The title of best floating table design can only go to those that rely on the gravity defying principle of Tensegrity. The tops of these tables really are being held up by nothing more than a set of self-contained strings!
Make an Impossible Floating Table | Tensegrity Table by Rene's Workshop But how is this even possible? Tensegrity is a structural principle based on tension and compression. So here the tension of the central string is supporting the top section of the model while the strings at the four corners are compressing it down. It’s this delicate balance of tensile force that creates a continuous pressure that stabilizes the entire structure!
And it doesn’t just work for miniature models. The principle supports full sized tables made out of wood and high strength wire, with more polished versions looking less like furniture and more like physics defying art!
Frame Clock
Don’t you just hate it when you need to check the time, but you’ve forgotten your phone or watch? A wall clock is usually your next best solution, though looking at the one below, you might mistake it for some super hipster picture frame!
Frame Clock by Meyer Objects But assuming it’s not 12 o’clock or 6 o’clock, you’d probably realize this oddly shaped art piece is actually a wall clock. Two separate sections that mimic the shape of the frame are attached to the hands, so as they move, the entire frame shifts into a different shape! Designed by Nazar Sigaher, the aptly named Frame Clock is strikingly unique. There’s just one issue though. Because all the hands are the same length, it’s hard to tell what the actual time is. As quirky and creative as it may be, this might have been a slight design oversight.
Vortex Rug
Nothing brings a room together quite like a well-placed rug, except this next rug looks like it’s tearing the room apart!
Fortunately for whoever lives here, it’s not actually a doorway to another dimension. These are Vortex rugs, incredibly cleverly designed mats that stretch out sections of a checkboard pattern which gradually get darker to look like they lead down into a black hole!
It works best when you’re looking at it head on so that the direction of the hole angles straight down. But even from the side, or upside down, it still looks like it could whisk you off to another dimension! And, despite what it looks like, this interdimensional interior design won’t cost you the earth. Found for as little as $30 online, just about anyone can afford this rug in their home!
Void Rug
But if you’re after an illusionary rug that’s sleeker and, for some reason, more terrifying, then the aptly named Void Rug might be the one for you.
Created by designer and clear hater of visitors, Scott Jarvie, the fear of falling this rug introduces to a room is enough to make anyone want to leave! The brilliantly simple design is achieved by using a simple grey crescent to skirt the outside of a big black oval. This grey gradient gets slightly darker in the middle, giving the illusion that the far side of the void is further away, which makes the whole hole, appear realistic! But this realism comes at a cost, with smaller rugs starting at a steep $250. Though it doesn’t just come in a circular shape! Rectangular runners are also available to fit snugly inside hallways. The one below would be perfect for making any unwelcome visitors think twice before stepping into your home!
Bower Studios Mirror
It’s not just rugs that can be transformed into apertures with some carefully placed skirting, though. This amazing mirror from Bower Studios proves that with a little tint, a mirror can be transformed into a magical door that looks like it leads to another reality!
It’s such a simple concept, but that doesn’t mean it’s cheap. At an astonishing $3,500, it’s a hefty price tag for a door that doesn’t lead anywhere! You can only wonder what would it cost to add a strip of black tint to a regular archway mirror? Not several thousand dollars, surely!
Good Vibrations Unit
Are you old enough to remember watching distorted VHS tapes which had those weird wavy lines that travelled up and down your TV screen? These familiarly fuzzy images occur when a tape gets old and starts to degrade, but despite the apparent distortion here, there’s actually nothing wrong with these images!
This weirdly wavy dresser may look like it belongs on a VHS tape, but every curve has been painstakingly carved out like that. Created by Fratelli Boffi,
this “Good Vibrations” unit was made using a computer numerical control machine. The wood carving machine used a specially coded program to achieve a flawlessly fuzzy finish! But the most astute among you might be wondering how those cupboards work. Just like an old, damaged VHS tape, they don’t! It actually conceals a bookcase behind all the creative curves.
Hole In The Floor Bookcase
You might think of bookcases as glorified shelving units, but they don’t always look so uniform, as proven by the wonderfully whimsical “Hole in The Floor” bookcase!
This incredible illusionary piece, which was designed by Raw Edges studio, looks like a series of drawers that have been pulled right out of the floor! Just imagine the fun you could have if these were in a kids room. I don’t know about you, but I’d definitely have wanted to read more as a kid if I thought that my books were being provided by a magical room in the floor!
Staircase Aquarium
But bookcases aren’t the only pieces of furniture that can look like they’re erupting from the floor! This fantastic staircase aquarium has been built to fit into the groove of the stairs, which doesn’t just make it a stunning centerpiece, but also ensures it won’t topple over!
What’s more, it acts as a handy, underwater night light! So, whoever owns this home won’t trip on their stairs in the dark ever again.
ABC Bookcase
Do you ever feel like you need a reminder to read a book once in a while? It’s easy to forget, but not if you have this bookcase.
You might not see why at first but take a really close look. Can you make out the cleverly concealed letters? Thanks to a few craftily placed shelves that perfectly fit a few good books, this unit spells out "READ YOUR BOOKCASE", which is pretty neat! However, if you’re a less avid reader, who doesn’t own enough books to fill up 16, 20-inch letter-like units, then don’t worry! The bookcase, created by Eva Alessandrini and Roberto Saporiti, is completely modular. That means you can buy as many or as few shelves as you like to make up whatever word you want! Personally, I’d get N O P E. Not just because my personal library is lacking, to say the least, but because these standing modules can cost up to $370 each! So, all together, that big bookcase costs almost $6,000!If you were amazed at these optical illustion furniture, you might want to read about
ingenious smart furniture. Thanks for reading!
