This Georgian Residential Complex Rejects Straight Lines on its Floor Plan, Mimicking The Ocean

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Straight lines are easy. Any architect can slap a rectangular tower on a plot and call it a day, and most beachfront developers do exactly that because straight lines are cheap, fast to build, and easy to sell off a brochure. Georgia’s Adjara coast just got a project that looked at that playbook and said absolutely not. Montemar Residential, a three tower complex rising in the seaside town of Gonio, ditches the grid entirely in favor of forms that ripple, curve, and cantilever like something dragged up from the Black Sea itself. It is the kind of building that makes you stop scrolling, then immediately want to know who signed off on it and how.

Designed by Irakli Emiridze and Irina Chkonia of Alpha Architecture, the complex sits on a 10,000 square meter plot within a UNESCO listed stretch of coastline, right where Adjara’s oddly tropical microclimate runs into the Black Sea. Each of the three 16 story towers tops out around 48 to 52 meters and wears a dramatic aluminum crown that flares out over the roofline like a mushroom cap, or if you squint, a seashell caught mid opening. Parking for 300 vehicles sits tucked below grade, keeping the ground plane free for landscaping and plazas. It is a lot of building, and it wants you to know it.

Designers: Irakli Emiridze and Irina Chkonia

The seashell inspiration shows up in how the facade behaves. The balcony edges do not stack in the usual identical, floor by floor grid you see on every coastal high rise from Miami to Marbella. Instead they undulate, staggering in and out like sediment ridges carved by tidal movement, which gives each tower a texture closer to a geological formation than a construction product. Aluminum embossed sheet cladding wraps the crowning terraces, catching light in a way that concrete or glass simply cannot, and it is the detail that separates Montemar from the generic curved tower trend that has been creeping through Gulf and Black Sea resort markets alike.

The space between the three towers is treated as public terrain rather than leftover setback, with green plantings, plazas, and communal zones designed to pull residents out of their units and into shared space. Panoramic apartments come with private terraces and jacuzzis angled toward the water, the kind of amenity that used to be penthouse exclusive and is now standard issue on any coastal development trying to compete for buyers. Whether that democratization of the infinity view holds up once the cranes clear out is the real test, since renderings are notoriously generous with light, weather, and empty beaches.

Gonio is a strange place for this kind of architectural swing. It is a historic town, not a resort capital, and Montemar is betting that sculptural ambition can coexist with a UNESCO designation next door rather than clash with it. If the finished towers deliver even half of what the renders promise, this stretch of the Adjara coast is about to become a lot more interesting to watch than its neighbors on the Black Sea.

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Mattel’s 1:1 brick-built Xbox is a 3,509-piece tribute to gaming’s early 2000s era

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The original Xbox is turning 25, and Mattel is marking the occasion with a collector’s piece that transforms Microsoft’s first gaming console into a 1:1-scale building set. Created under the premium Mattel Brick Shop, the Microsoft Xbox Building Toy Kit recreates the chunky 2001 console from 3,509 pieces, complete with its oversized Duke controller and a surprisingly elaborate interior.

At first glance, the model is designed to look remarkably close to the original hardware. The familiar black rectangular body, recessed side grilles, front controller ports, X-shaped top panel, and central green Xbox logo are all recreated in brick form. The accompanying Duke controller is also buildable and connects to the console, with working buttons, a D-pad, and movable analog sticks. It is a display model rather than a functional gaming machine, but the physical interaction is part of what makes the set more than a static replica.

Designer: Mattel

The set also follows a growing interest in turning gaming hardware into physical building objects. A few years ago, we covered a LEGO Xbox Series S concept that treated the console itself as a customizable canvas for brick-built artwork. Mattel’s new creation takes a detour from the conventional brick-building approach, though, as it employs bricks to personalize a console, using thousands of them to recreate an entire piece of gaming history.

The more interesting details are hidden inside the console. Opening the model reveals three removable dioramas inspired by some of the original Xbox’s most recognizable games: Halo: Combat Evolved, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, and Psychonauts. Each scene comes with small NanoWorld figures representing characters from the games, with 12 figures included across the set. The dioramas can also be removed and displayed independently, giving the enormous console a modular quality rather than making its interior purely decorative.

Mattel has also given the model a modest interactive layer. Pressing buttons on the connected Duke controller activates four different light-and-sound sequences, including the original Xbox opening sequence and effects associated with the three game-inspired scenes. A concealed button combination triggers an additional lighting sequence, adding a small Easter egg for builders who spend time exploring the finished model.

The choice of games is particularly evocative. Halo helped define Xbox as a gaming platform, while Morrowind and Psychonauts represent different sides of the console’s early library. Rather than simply reproducing the hardware, Mattel has effectively turned the console into a compact museum of its formative years, with the games physically embedded into the machine they helped make memorable.

For anyone who remembers the original Xbox as a piece of hardware rather than simply a platform, that distinction is significant. The finished model is essentially a life-size nostalgia object, one that preserves the proportions and visual language of Microsoft’s first console while hiding miniature worlds from its games inside.

The set is intended for builders aged 17 and above and is positioned firmly as a premium collector display rather than a conventional toy. It is currently available for preorder through select retailers, with a US price of $324.

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CUKTECH’s 300W Desktop Charger Wants to Replace Your Entire Drawer of Power Bricks

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If you have ever charged a Xiaomi phone with the bundled brick, there is a decent chance CUKTECH’s engineers had a hand in it, even though the name never made it onto the packaging. The company started in 2016 as a straight up OEM, building chargers behind the scenes for Xiaomi and other big players, before merging with ZMI in 2022 and finally launching products under its own name. It is the classic story of a supplier deciding it was tired of being invisible.

That decision has paid off. The CUKTECH 30 Charging Station Ultra just picked up two wins at the European Product Design Award, one for computer accessories and one for office appliances, thanks to a 300W GaN powered design from Chong Wang and Ziyao Wang. We have followed the brand’s climb as its power banks and chargers kept getting screens, better materials, and sharper industrial design with every release. This latest charging station, with its five ports and a live readout of exactly what your gear is pulling, is the moment the sleeper brand stops sleeping.

Designers: Chong Wang & Ziyao Wang

Three USB-C ports, one USB-A port, and a dedicated DC output share the front face, and together they can push out up to 300W total. The two primary USB-C ports handle up to 140W each under PD 3.1, which covers most modern laptops without breaking a sweat, but the real number only shows up when you route power through the DC port. That single line is built to talk directly to compatible laptops and can hit the full 300W ceiling on its own, essentially replacing the oversized proprietary brick that usually ships in the box. I have three of those bricks sitting in a drawer right now doing absolutely nothing, and a single box that can outmuscle all of them at once is exactly the kind of consolidation I did not know I needed.

Third generation GaN sits at the core of the whole system, paired with what CUKTECH calls a PFC plus LLC dual architecture, a combination chosen specifically to keep five simultaneous charging sessions stable without the unit turning into a space heater. Gallium nitride has become the default material for anyone chasing high wattage in a small footprint, since it switches more efficiently than older silicon designs and sheds heat faster under sustained load. Thirteen fast charging protocols are baked in, including PD 3.1, PPS, Xiaomi’s own 120W standard, UFCS, Huawei SCP, and both QC and AFC, which is a genuinely broad net for a single charger to cast. Intelligent power allocation reads what is plugged in and redistributes wattage on the fly, with specific tuning for handhelds like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally that tend to confuse less sophisticated multi port chargers.

A 1.83 inch IPS display sits front and center, color coded per port, tracking wattage, voltage, and current across all five connections in real time, with a small running graph of total load underneath. Most chargers ask you to trust a single LED and hope for the best. This one just tells you, continuously, which is a small shift that changes how the object feels to live with on a desk. Nine layers of protection cover temperature, over-voltage, and over-current scenarios, which matters more than usual given how much power is moving through a chassis this size.

The form itself leans minimal, angled slightly on a magnetic tilting base so the screen stays readable without craning your neck, and finished in a two tone silver and black that reads more like studio monitor than power strip. A right angle DC cable keeps the desk tidier than the usual straight jack, and the grounded three pin AC cable is a small nod to safety that a lot of competitors skip to save a few cents.

None of this would matter much if the pricing did not make sense, and at $159.99 it lands right where a serious desk upgrade should, undercutting rivals capped at 140W or 200W while offering meaningfully more headroom. CUKTECH spent a decade building other companies’ chargers before it ever put its own name on a box. Two design award wins later, it is clear that decade taught them exactly which details actually matter.

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