This Weighted Shoehorn Rights Itself Like a Roly-Poly Toy

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Shoehorns have been around for centuries, and their design has barely moved. Most are anonymous strips of plastic or metal that live behind closet doors and rarely see daylight unless someone’s wrestling with a stiff new pair of shoes. They do one job, they do it acceptably, and then they disappear. It’s a category where function was solved long ago, and form has been cheerfully overlooked ever since.

That neglect is the starting point for DROP, a concept prototype that treats the shoehorn as both a sculptural object and an emotional one. The goal isn’t to make it work better but to make it something you’d actually want to live with. That’s a harder problem, and it leads somewhere more interesting than a redesigned grip or a slightly longer handle.

Designer: Alexander Matyuk

The concept draws from a very specific moment in nature: the instant a water droplet meets a surface. That brief, almost elusive state between motion and stillness became a static form. The tall conical body represents the droplet at the moment of impact, and the shallow curved base beneath traces the ripples spreading outward. It’s a frozen movement given a permanent material shape.

The lead-weighted internal base concentrates mass low enough that DROP behaves like a roly-poly toy: tilt it, push it, set it at an angle, and it returns upright on its own. That self-righting character turns each use into a quiet interaction. The shoehorn responds to each nudge, rocks gently, then steadies itself. For something usually treated as a passive object, that responsiveness is unexpectedly engaging.

The curved shoehorn blade extends from the conical body, ready when needed. The design stands between 550mm and 700mm tall, firmly in long-handled territory. That height means you can ease your heel into a shoe without bending, which matters in a narrow entryway, for older users, or for anyone whose back has had enough by the time they’re heading out.

The designer envisions two production tiers. The premium version uses an aluminum alloy body with a lead-weighted internal base, produced through casting or milling. A mass-market version uses composites or polymers to bring the form to a lower price point. Three finish options appear in the concept: a clear glass-like version, a dark smoked variation, and a matte brushed metal option.

A shoehorn that stands on its own without a hook or bracket is already more practical than most. DROP’s broad curved base and low center of gravity mean it doesn’t need to be stored. It can stay out near the door, part of the entry space, rather than an object to stash and inevitably forget about. The ripple-shaped base takes care of that stability by itself.

DROP treats a forgotten tool as a worthy subject for genuine craft and material thinking. Most entryways could use an object that earns its spot on the floor rather than hiding behind a door. The roly-poly mechanism, the water-inspired form, and the weighted base all quietly serve that same goal.

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The Designer Who Hid His Dumbbells Built Bronze Ones Worth Displaying

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Home fitness equipment has quietly moved into the living room, but most of it hasn’t earned its place there. Dumbbells in particular are purely functional objects, usually made with rubber-coated iron and sold on practical merits alone. They get used, then tucked away or left on the floor because nobody really wants them on display. For most people, what’s out of sight tends to be out of mind.

Tokyo-based designer Kenji Abe knows this from personal experience. He would put his own dumbbells in a drawer when friends came over, and then forget about them entirely. That specific frustration became the brief for MANTLE, a pair of bronze dumbbells produced under the ifuki brand in Takaoka City, Japan. The goal was a dumbbell you’d actually want to leave out, all day, even on a good shelf.

Designer: Kenji Abe

That required rethinking the object from the start. MANTLE combines several surface treatments on a single cast form, with sandblasted sections contrasting against mirror-polished areas. The result carries the visual weight of a sculpture or a piece of jewelry rather than exercise equipment. Set on a side table, it reads as an intentional object, not something that ended up there because there was nowhere else to put it.

The form is just as deliberate. Inspired loosely by the armadillo, the sculptural shape is perfectly balanced, which means the dumbbell stands upright on its own without tipping. A grip tilted at 45 degrees makes it easy to pick up from any angle, and the smooth bronze surface was selected specifically to feel comfortable against skin rather than abrasive during a workout.

The versatility goes further than the grip. You can hold it conventionally for curls or presses, slide it over a wrist to add resistance to arm movements, or hook it around a foot for leg raises. The same object adapts across different exercises without needing adjustments, and the balanced form means it doesn’t fight you regardless of how you’re holding it or what you’re doing.

MANTLE also ages gracefully. Bronze develops character over time, and the combination of matte sandblasting and mirror polishing makes that aging process something worth watching. The material catches light differently across its surfaces, and the contrast in textures gives it a depth that most gym equipment doesn’t have the ambition to pursue.

MANTLE won the Grand Prize at the Toyama Design Competition in 2018 before being developed into a commercial product through ifuki. Abe’s reasoning has always been straightforward: a well-designed dumbbell doesn’t get hidden away, and one that doesn’t get hidden away is one that actually gets used. The drawer stays empty, and the habit becomes a little harder to abandon.

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Hermès Just Built a DJ Table in Mahogany and Cowhide

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If you told me five years ago that Hermès would release a DJ table, I’d have assumed it was a joke told at a fashion party where nobody laughed. And yet here we are, looking at the Atelier Horizons Disque Jockey Club: a fully functioning DJ setup built in mahogany and wrapped in Pippa cowhide, with Japanese turntables fitted right in. It is, objectively, one of the most absurd and wonderful things I’ve seen come out of a luxury house in recent memory.

Let me back up a little. Atelier Horizons is Hermès’ bespoke workshop, run by creative director Axel de Beaufort. It exists in that rare space where the impossible meets the impeccably crafted. We’re talking leather-covered jukeboxes with Murano glass stands. Bespoke boomboxes. A birdcage bag that reportedly took three years to complete. The whole operation runs on one guiding principle: if you can imagine it and it can be made with extraordinary craft, Horizons will figure it out. What it is not, de Beaufort has made very clear, is a branding exercise. “We are not a branded company, we are craftsmen,” he’s said. And when you look at the DJ table, you believe him.

Designer: Hermès (photos from High Snobiety Design)

The Disque Jockey Club was developed in collaboration with British DJ Prince Charles (yes, that’s his actual name, and no, he is not a monarch). It’s fully functional, not decorative. The turntables are real, the mixer is real, and the whole setup performs exactly as a working DJ rig should. The French furniture craftsmen who built the wooden structure made sure of that. But it’s the material choices that make it so specifically Hermès: mahogany, warm and rich, paired with cowskin that has that unmistakable texture of something made to last several lifetimes. It doesn’t shout luxury. It doesn’t need to.

I’ll be the first to admit that a designer DJ table sits comfortably in the category of things very few people actually need. But I think that framing misses the point entirely. Atelier Horizons isn’t about need. It never was. It’s about the intersection of craft and desire, about what happens when a house with nearly two centuries of leather expertise decides to turn its attention toward a turntable. The result is less a product and more a provocation: what if the things we use to make music were treated with the same care and intention as the things we wear?

That question lands differently right now. We live in an era of disposable aesthetics, where everything from furniture to consumer electronics is designed to be replaced within a few years. The Hermès DJ table is the philosophical opposite of that. It’s an object that asks to be kept, passed down, maybe even argued over in an estate somewhere decades from now. There is something genuinely radical about that, even if the price tag ensures it lives in a very particular tax bracket.

All of this fits into a broader shift happening across luxury right now. The most interesting moves aren’t on the runway; they’re in spaces like this, where fashion houses start thinking like furniture designers, architects, and now apparently audio engineers. Hermès isn’t the only brand doing it, but they might be doing it with the most conviction. The Atelier Horizons pieces never feel like branded merchandise dressed up in leather. They feel like objects that had to exist, born from a genuine creative compulsion rather than a marketing calendar.

The DJ table is also, let’s be honest, wildly compelling on a purely visual level. The combination of dark mahogany and pale cowhide is exactly the kind of thing that photographs beautifully and looks even better in person. It occupies a room with quiet confidence and zero need for explanation. It’s not decorative in the way most luxury objects lean decorative. It’s still a working tool, one that just happens to look extraordinary while doing its job. You don’t have to be a DJ to want it. You don’t even have to own a record. You just have to appreciate the idea that craft, when taken seriously, can turn almost anything into art.

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Ferrari Luce brings Jony Ive’s clean design philosophy to electric sports car built for pure driving emotion

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Ferrari has been quietly working under the wraps to design an electric sports car in collaboration with LoveFrom, led by Jony Ive and Marc Newson. After much speculation and a run of rumors for quite some time, the Maranello-based car maker has finally revealed Luce, its first-ever electric sports car, to the world, which, quite frankly, looks unlike the prancing horse we are accustomed to seeing. The four-door EV is all set to arrive in the USA by spring 2027 for around $430,000, and we hope the performance will mute critics like us, who have been used to the sculpted form of the Ferrari for decades.

Love it or hate it, the exterior and interior done by Jhony’s design house is a radical shift from what the Italian marque is known for. The car is shaped more like a performance SUV that can safely carry around five people inside. Yes, that’s right, as the Purosangue SUV held that honor before this reveal. Under the hood, the muted prancing horse is built around a completely new all-electric architecture.

Designer: Ferrari

Ferrari Luce gets its combined 1,050 horsepower thrust from the four independent electric motors that hurl it from a standstill to 200 km/h in mere 2.5 seconds. Top speed can go in excess of 310 km/h, which is right there in the Ferrari territory. The electric motors feeding four of the wheels independently derive their power from the 122kWh battery pack developed on the 800V architecture. Driving range on this performance vehicle is claimed to be 530km, but I’m sure in the high-octane driving modes, it’ll drop quite significantly. Ferrari has confirmed that the EV supports 350kW charging speed, with more than half the battery juiced up in just 20 minutes.

The all-electric architecture and the futuristic looks are not the only big changes. Luce comes loaded with technologies never before seen on a road-legal Ferrari. Things like active aerodynamic grilles, active suspension (used in the F80 hypercar), Torque Shift Engagement system to simulate progressive acceleration, and the four-wheel independent torque vectoring we talked about earlier. The Italian marque has also been able to achieve the lowest drag coefficient ever on a road car thanks to the aerodynamic all-aluminum bodywork and the adaptive ride height system, which lowers the front section by 10mm at high speeds.

Cabin on this one is far forward than any other Ferrari we’ve seen, and the center-opening side doors demonstrate what influence LoveFrom has had on the EV sports car. The futuristic front seems floating, while the rear has a more Ferrari sports car vibe to it. Nonetheless, the overall exterior design is “smooth, continuous, and uninterrupted.” The interior carries the same futuristic design inspiration with a Samsung Display developed OLED layered dashboard that employs Samsung’s HIAA tech, natively used in Galaxy phones. The layered layout of the instrument cluster is first ever seen on a production car, as the two OLED panels stacked on top of each other have mechanical hands sandwiched between them. There’s a central pivoting touchscreen with physical switches on the Luce, and another screen on the rear for the passengers. The aluminum steering wheel has a couple of manettino dials, an e-manettino dial to control the powertrain, and a standard five-position unit.

Ferrari Luce has a total curb weight of 4,982 pounds, measures 197.9 inches long, and 60.8 inches high. This gives the maker freedom to set the center of gravity quite low for superior handling and minimum body roll, as the weight distribution is done quite well for sharper handling characteristics. Being one of the biggest road-going Ferraris ever made, the performance EV rides on 23-inch front and 24-inch rear wheels to complement the proportions.

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The Leaked Apple Watch Series 12 Upgrades Everyone is Talking About

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The Leaked Apple Watch Series 12 Upgrades Everyone is Talking About Touch ID sensor integrated into the Apple Watch Series 12.

The Apple Watch Series 12 and WatchOS 27 are poised to deliver significant advancements in wearable technology. With a combination of innovative hardware and software enhancements, these updates aim to improve security, performance, and usability. By integrating innovative features, Apple seeks to redefine how you interact with your smartwatch, making it an even more versatile […]

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