The $170 Clock That Wants You Off Your Phone at Night

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Most of us fall asleep holding the very thing that’s keeping us awake. The phone. The infinite scroll. The algorithm engineered to make you feel like you’re missing something if you put it down. It’s a strange modern paradox, that a device built for connection has become the dominant object in one of the most intimate spaces in our home: the bedroom. Hatch seems to have understood this better than most, and their Restore 3 is a quiet but deliberate argument for doing things differently.

On paper, it’s a smart sleep clock. A well-designed one, yes, but still, at its core, a bedside device that helps you fall asleep and wake up. What makes it worth talking about isn’t necessarily the specs, though they’re solid. It’s the philosophy behind it. The entire product is built around the idea of putting your phone down, and keeping it that way.

Designer: Hatch

That’s where the redesigned hardware comes in. Unlike its predecessor, the Restore 3 has five physical controls: three on top, including a pause button, an Unwind Swap button, and what Hatch calls the Big Button, plus two more on the sides for the bedside light and alarm toggle. You can swap your wind-down routine, adjust volume, and silence your alarm without ever picking up your phone. It sounds minor until you realize how reflexively most of us grab the phone the second the alarm goes off, then somehow lose forty minutes to Instagram before we’ve brushed our teeth.

The design itself is clean and restrained in a way that feels intentional. Compact at roughly 7.24 inches wide and just over 5 inches tall, it comes in three muted colorways: Putty, Greige, and Cocoa. None of them scream “tech product.” All of them could pass for a ceramic lamp or a minimalist decor piece, which is likely the point. It’s designed to disappear into your nightstand while doing a lot of work. The time display is almost comically understated, barely noticeable at a glance.

Where the Restore 3 earns its $169.99 price tag is in the routines. Hatch structures your night into three stages: unwind, sleep, wake. During the unwind phase, you can cycle through immersive light and audio experiences, including meditations, bedtime podcasts, sleep soundscapes, and layered ambient sounds. The sleep phase takes over from there, and in the morning, a gradually brightening sunrise alarm eases you out of sleep rather than yanking you out of it. You set all of this through the companion app and then, ideally, never touch your phone again until morning.

The optional Hatch+ subscription, at five dollars a month or fifty for the year, unlocks over 100 sounds and lighting programs, with new content added regularly. A 30-day trial comes included with every purchase, which is a smart way to explore the full library before committing. Without the subscription, you still get access to more than 20 alarm sounds and 12 color noise options, which is genuinely more than most people will ever cycle through.

A few caveats worth naming: the Restore 3 doesn’t track your sleep. No biometric sensors, no data scores, no readiness analysis to scroll through every morning. For some, that’s a dealbreaker. Personally, I think it’s a feature. Sleep culture has gotten strangely clinical, with people waking up to check scores and percentages before they’ve had coffee. The Restore 3 isn’t interested in quantifying your rest. It just tries to improve it.

It’s also worth noting that the sunset mode, which winds down the lighting at night, isn’t as gradual as some competing sunrise alarms. If you’re particularly sensitive to light cues, that’s a real consideration. Still, the Restore 3 gets far more right than it gets wrong. It’s a thoughtfully designed product in a category that tends toward the overly clinical or the embarrassingly basic. The fact that it actually looks good on your nightstand while doing something genuinely useful puts it in a rare category. Sometimes the best tech is the kind that quietly asks you to use less of it.

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Japanese Designer Built Furniture With No Glue or Screws

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Most furniture is held together by things you can’t see. Mortise-and-tenon joints, steel brackets, wood glue applied in generous amounts before being clamped overnight. The craft of traditional joinery is genuinely impressive, and furniture historians will rightly tell you it’s one of the oldest engineering feats in human history. But a Japanese designer named Tact Inoue just asked a simple question: what if you didn’t need any of that?

His answer is Mocky, a furniture series that throws out conventional joinery entirely and replaces it with heat, pressure, and the natural behavior of a material most people walk past every day without a second thought.

Designer: Tact Inoue

The material in question is artificial wood, specifically the kind composed of wood flour and resin, commonly used in outdoor decking. It’s not a glamorous material by any stretch. You’ve probably seen it on a boardwalk, a backyard patio, or a poolside deck. It blends in, does its job, and gets credited with being “low maintenance.” Tact Inoue looked at that material and saw something different entirely.

Because of its resin content, artificial wood can be heated until it softens. Inoue takes that softened state and presses the components together using a 20-tonne press machine. The heated surfaces fuse, adhering to each other as they cool. There are no fasteners, no glue, no mortise-and-tenon joints. The connection is the material itself. What comes out the other side looks nothing like what you’d expect from anything made of wood: warped surfaces, irregular joints, organic protrusions where two pieces met and merged under pressure.

And the thing is, it looks extraordinary. The imperfections are the point. Inoue isn’t treating the irregularities as flaws to be corrected before the piece ships. The warping and distortion that happen during the heat-pressing process are built into the design language of Mocky from the start. Irregularity is an active part of the making, not an accident of it. Each joint emerges from the behavior of the softened material rather than from a pre-drawn spec sheet. That’s a genuinely different relationship between designer and material, one where control is shared rather than total.

One of the standout pieces in the series is a bench that requires no aprons or stretchers to hold it together. The seat is made of two completely independent components that bond entirely through the fused connection. From a structural standpoint, that’s remarkable. From a visual one, it’s striking in the best way: a piece that looks grown rather than built.

That distinction matters. So much furniture design right now falls into one of two camps: aggressively minimal, where the process is hidden and the object looks like it appeared fully formed, or intentionally handmade, where visible effort is treated as the point. Mocky doesn’t fully belong to either. The process is visible, but it isn’t precious. The irregularity is intentional, but it isn’t decorative for its own sake. It reads as material honesty, which is a rarer quality in furniture than we might assume.

Inoue is also making a quieter argument about what artificial wood is for. It has spent its entire commercial life as a substitute, a stand-in for timber that doesn’t want to rot on your deck. Mocky pushes back on that framing. When you stop treating artificial wood as a replacement for something better and start treating it as a material with its own specific properties, it turns out it can do things natural wood never could. You cannot melt a solid oak leg into a joint. You cannot fuse cherry wood planks into each other using pressure alone.

That shift in perspective, from material-as-substitute to material-on-its-own-terms, is what makes Mocky feel genuinely interesting rather than just visually surprising. It’s a reminder that designers often do their best work not when they reach for the expected material, but when they ask what a rejected or overlooked one is actually capable of. The answer, in this case, is quite a lot.

The post Japanese Designer Built Furniture With No Glue or Screws first appeared on Yanko Design.