TAYBLES tap into our nostalgia for cassette tapes, a love of handcrafted wood furniture and a functional desire to have mood lighting close at hand.

The Los Angeles company creates wooden tables, each shaped like a tape and sealed with clear epoxy. LED lights tucked into the pair of central holes add light and color to the room.

The ‘tape’ part of the cassette turns out to conceal a secret, too: storage space for books, gadgets or, well, tapes, situated in the center of the empty table.

The biggest difference between models (besides the great variety of woods and their associated hues) is, of course, the label, which can be customized to feature your favorite tunes, a hand-written list of songs or whatever you desire.

Minimalist metal supports provide a likewise-vintage and non-distracting structural system to keep your tape table floating on air.

The post Mixtape Coffee Tables Remix Retro Nostalgia & Vintage Furniture first appeared on Gajitz.

Good ol’ sturdy wood has been providing us with fire, furniture, houses, pencils, and a million other things since the first human figured out how to kill a tree. But here’s a new way to use wood that we never thought was possible: sewing it.

Product designers Anastasiya Koshcheeva and Oya-Meryem Yanik changes the way molded wood is used. Chester, as they have named it, is an innovative surface material that is held together with stitches rather than with glue, lending a folksy, quilted look to whatever it adorns.

Chester can be used on its own to make unique furniture or decorative pieces, but it can also be applied over plywood for a sturdier, thicker, prettier piece of furniture.

One of the benefits of Chester is that its quilting gives it a soft, cushiony feeling. Bent wood furniture – traditionally stylish but hard on the backside – can now enjoy the softness of a fabric-covered piece. Once the designers complete their development and get Chester to market, anyway.

The post Sewn Wood is a Brand New Use for an Age-Old Material first appeared on Gajitz.

Sueshiro Sano was born into a Japanese shipwright family that stretched back nine generations. He built his first ship at the age of 13 and continued to hone his craft into adulthood, but what makes him stand out now is the entirely different direction he decided to take his skills in.

Sano uses his skills and tools to make some of the most remarkable bespoke bikes we’ve ever seen. Working with Honduran mahogany, Sano custom hand-crafts the lightweight bikes for each buyer based on the buyer’s specific measurements and needs.

Each bike is a work of functional art. A single bike takes up to three months to make and can cost up to $20,000. But by all accounts, the bikes are more than worth their price. They’ve garnered a cult following among cyclists and bike experts.

But for Sano, the goal isn’t about gaining praise for his work. He simply makes the bikes – and ensures their superior quality – as a point of personal pride. His traditional woodworking techniques have taken the grandiosity of a hand-built ship and made it (somewhat) more accessible in the form of incredibly stylish, gorgeously crafted one-of-a-kind bicycles.

The post Ship to Shore: Bespoke Wooden Bikes Built by a Shipwright first appeared on Gajitz.

You have a ton of choices for getting your data from one place to another, but flash drives are a classic. Etsy seller miniFab combines the flash drive with more classic technology: retro 8-bit video game controllers.

The 4GB Wood Gamer Flash Drives are made from bamboo and have an attached keychain for keeping them close at hand. Each one is emblazoned with the image of a classic NES or Super NES controller or a Gameboy.

The flash drives can be personalized with an engraved name or message. At $25, the 4GB USB drive seems like a pretty great gift for the 8-bit game enthusiast on your list.

The post Bamboo Flash Drives Look Like Classic NES Controllers first appeared on Gajitz.

Nope, you aren’t looking at a weird decorative light bulb-shaped sculpture. The Wooden Light by designer Ryosuke Fukusada is a functional light bulb that looks just like a solid piece of wood.

Fukusada created the light bulb in collaboration with German light bulb maker LEDON. The illusion was invented by creating an exceptionally thin – 1/10th of one inch – bulb shaped casing of wood veneer. An LED is fitted inside to illuminate the illusory mini-lampshade.

When the light is turned off, the bulb looks just like a solid piece of wood hanging from a cord – perhaps a piece of minimalist art or funky decor. But when it is turned on, the light shines through the rings, swirls, and natural shapes of the wood grain.

The lovely light looks red as it makes its way through the pine covering. It isn’t as bright as a normal light bulb; the designer likens it to holding a flashlight in your hand. But its unique look and lovely ambient light would let it fit in perfectly in any room.

The post Wonderul Wooden Light Bulb Shines With Warm Subtle Glow first appeared on Gajitz.