Would You Buy This Stackable Furniture Kit For Tiny Apartments?

So you've decided to chuck it all and move into a tiny apartment. Good for you! But what about the odd occasion when you have to accommodate more guests than your petite couch can handle? Michal Blutrich—a recent industrial design graduate from the Bezalel Academy, in Jerusalem—proposes a compact tower of composed of a lamp, table, and cushions to offer furniture just when you need it.

Pile's concept is an exercise in multifunctional and modular furniture. Arrange the blue cushions like a gym mat. Each one has a hole through the center perfectly positioned so that the four legs of the accompanying metal table fit through them. The white crescent cushions become seats or neck pillows and the LED lamp offers ambient light and can be positioned three different ways. When you're all done, thread the lamp through the table, drop the cushions over the lamp, and it stacks into a tidy tower.

"I came up with my project from a series of observations in our daily life," Blutrich says. "As cities become bigger and bigger and apartments becomes smaller, the possibility of hosting friends becomes more difficult—it slowly disappears. I believe that hosting is a very big topic in our lives and I felt the very urgent need to solve this problem of space and hosting. By designing a multifunctional object that on the one hand acts like an abstract minimal furniture and on the other reacts as a fully equipped hosting area for you and your friends to hang out, chat, eat and even to spend a night. Shortly: An object that regains space, where it seems like there isn't."

The clever design aspires to do a lot, but its execution is a little rough around the edges, a common challenge with prototypes. With a bit more refinement—and the right selling price—it has potential, presuming you're okay with sitting on the floor for long periods of time. Apartments are only getting smaller and furniture will have to rise to the challenge. Blutrich and his colleague, Karl Frederik Scholz, are currently at work developing stackable furniture to work, sleep, and cook for the Bauhaus Dessau Institute.

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