If we see something worth remembering, or something we want to celebrate, our first instinct is to reach for our smartphones and snap a picture or video. But what happens when your phone battery dies, your storage is full, or it simply isn’t on you when the moment strikes? That’s exactly when having a tiny, always-with-you camera comes in handy. All you have to do is reach into your pocket, and you’re ready to shoot.

Yashica has become one of the brands leading the charge in blending modern convenience with old-school charm, and its FUNtastic Keychain Camera line is proof of that. The lineup offers plenty of designs to choose from, and with every new release, Yashica adds even more characters and collaborations to pick from. The brand has now built an entire creative universe around this idea called FUNtastic World, designed to celebrate the many different personalities and styles its fans bring to the table.

Designer: Yashica

To celebrate this new universe, Yashica is rolling out four new camera designs, and each one comes with its own specific “personality.” Every camera in the collection is, of course, ultra-compact and built with a wearable form factor, so you can clip it onto your bag, belt loop, keychain, or anywhere else that keeps it close by at all times. Each one also features a 180-degree flip screen, making it perfect for selfies, group shots, and any moment you want to be part of instead of just capturing from behind the lens. As an added bonus, every FUNtastic camera also comes with a built-in LED light, since some of the most memorable moments don’t happen in perfect lighting. Think indoor concerts, parties, festivals, and spontaneous evenings with friends. It’s a small detail that makes a big difference when the fun doesn’t stop once the sun goes down.

The four new camera designs are:

Yashica Sailor Boy (Wanderers)
This design channels Yashica’s original character and captures a true sense of adventure with clean, maritime-inspired colors. It’s made for the free spirit in you, the one who’s always ready to explore what’s around the next corner.

Basketball Snoopy (Sparks)
This sports-inspired design channels our favorite beagle’s endlessly positive energy. It celebrates teamwork, friendship, and staying active, making it the perfect companion for your next pickup game or afternoon at the park with friends.

Cherries Hello Kitty (Blush)
This cherry-inspired design gives our favorite cat (or human dressed as one) a sweet, vibrant aesthetic. It’s made for the days when you’re feeling cheerful and want to add a little brightness to your look, and your life.

Polka Dot Edition (Blush)
This is the more stylish version of Hello Kitty, combining a timeless polka-dot pattern with the character’s signature charm for a look that feels both classic and contemporary. It’s made for the days when you’re feeling cute and ready to add a little extra pizzazz to your outfit.

All four YASHICA FUNtastic Keychain Cameras are now available for pre-order at yashica.com, with shipments expected to begin the week of September 28, 2026. And if you’re already thinking about who else might love one, you’re onto something. With its collectible designs, character collaborations, and everyday usability, FUNtastic makes a fantastic gift for friends, family, and fans of the characters and pop culture alike.

At the end of the day, FUNtastic isn’t just about snapping quick photos. It’s about making room for spontaneity in a world that often feels too scheduled and too filtered. It’s a reminder that not every memory needs a perfectly lit, perfectly staged shot. Sometimes the best photos are the blurry, laughing, in-between ones you almost didn’t catch. Whether you’re the Sailor Boy dreaming about your next trip, the Basketball Snoopy chasing adventure with friends, or the Hello Kitty fan looking to add a little extra sweetness to your everyday carry, there’s a FUNtastic personality out there with your name on it. And since your mood can change from one day to the next, why not have a camera that changes right along with you?

The post 4 Keychain Cameras Nobody Will Leave the House Without first appeared on Yanko Design.

Athletes who used to buy a separate walkie-talkie, action camera, and wind meter for different pursuits are looking at a much lighter hardware bill these days. Motion Rivalry’s REACH folds all three into one modular sports GPS computer, snapping on whichever accessory a session calls for instead of stocking a shelf of standalone gadgets. The same unit adapts across cycling, rowing, kayaking, canoeing, and paragliding, with hardware you reconfigure instead of replace as training shifts from one discipline to the next.

The mechanism behind that swap is a single open-source connector at the top of the unit, accepting hardware modules in seconds rather than minutes of fumbling with tools. Instead of buying a new device for each need or sport, REACH treats its body as a base you keep building on, sport after sport. It’s less a finished gadget, more a foundation designed to grow alongside whatever discipline has your attention this season.

Designer: Motion Rivalry

Click Here to Buy Now: $359 $599 (40% off). Hurry, only a few left! Raised over $122,000.

Two of the four available modules handle situational awareness. The Walkie-Talkie module lets a coach on the riverbank stay in contact mid-session, working across 0.6 to 1.2 miles (1 to 2 kilometers) of line-of-sight range with multiple channels. The Radar module covers what’s coming around you, using 24GHz mmWave sensing to detect objects between 16 and 98 feet away across a 100-degree field of view.

The other two lean into documentation and conditions. A Camera module records 1080p video at 60 frames per second from a rotatable, splash-resistant housing mounted where the head unit already sits, skipping a separate action-camera bracket. A Wind Meter module adds live wind speed readings down to 0.1 meters per second, along with humidity and temperature, numbers that matter more than they sound once you’re airborne.

Rowing, kayaking, and canoeing put REACH’s fastest sensors to work. A 10Hz multi-constellation GNSS (most sports GPS units run 1 to 5Hz) locks position ten times a second, catching velocity changes within a single stroke rather than average splits over a lap. A 200Hz 9-axis IMU tracks heading drift, turning a wandering line into a number a coach can correct. REACH folds both into a Stroke Quality score, and Legacy Mode keeps it comparable to existing benchmarks.

On a bike, REACH estimates cadence and power without external sensors. It tracks linear and angular acceleration from the pedaling motion, then fuses and normalizes those readings to amplify the unique signal of your stroke while filtering out road noise. The result is a stable cadence reading without the need for extra hardware, precise to about 4 inches (10 centimeters) of elevation change.

The 3.5-inch display lays out speed, gradient, distance, and training stress score in a format built for glancing down mid-ride. Power estimates follow that same sensor-fusion approach, translating the normalized motion signals into a wattage figure without ever needing a crank sensor or power pedal bolted to the frame, one less accessory to charge, pair, or lose track of before a ride.

The same unit that tracked stroke rate on a river can be strapped to a flight harness by afternoon. In paragliding mode, REACH runs a dedicated vario for climb and sink rates, layers terrain maps adjusted for wind, and predicts landing zones from live wind direction and speed. Every reading here works toward one goal, keeping a pilot ahead of conditions that shift by the minute.

Catching a thermal updraft mid-flight is one thing; marking it for next time is another. A single press on REACH saves that exact location to the map, ready for your next pass, future flights, or anyone else in the flying community using the same site. Fly the same ridge enough times, and what used to be guesswork turns into a precision heat map built entirely by pilots who’ve actually flown it.

That Legacy Mode feature earns its own mention outside of rowing, too. Coaches who’ve spent seasons building benchmarks around specific equipment don’t want new hardware that outputs numbers in an unfamiliar format, no matter how good those numbers are. By matching its readings to formats already in use, REACH slots into existing programs instead of asking a team to relearn how it measures progress.

That data doesn’t stay trapped on the screen. The dedicated companion app on iOS and Android pairs over Bluetooth LE for route planning, reviewing a session, and Over-the-Air firmware updates once you’re back on solid ground. Sessions export as .FIT, .GPX, or .CSV and sync directly to Strava, so switching to REACH doesn’t mean abandoning platforms already in use. With 24GB of onboard storage, five sports’ worth of sessions won’t fill it.

Every one of those features lives inside a 5.5-ounce (156-gram) shell wrapped around a 3.5-inch display that stays legible in direct sunlight. An IPX7 rating handles rain, spray, and cold, while a 2,900mAh battery delivers up to 26 hours per charge. A programmable RGB strip along the base, assignable to stroke rate, split, or heart rate, glows green when you’re in the zone and a different color when you drift out, proof that REACH treats hardware as just another surface for good design.

Click Here to Buy Now: $359 $599 (40% off). Hurry, only a few left! Raised over $122,000.

The post REACH Is a Modular Sports GPS Computer Built to Snap Into Any Sport first appeared on Yanko Design.

Watch a small metal ball drop through a tube, and normally that’s it; blink, and it’s over. But drop it through MetMo Eddy, and something strange happens: the fall stretches out, like gravity took a breath. This palm-sized copper cylinder is a precision-machined desk toy that turns a real electromagnetic effect into something you can hold, flip, and watch happen right in front of your eyes, no batteries required.

That slow-motion trick isn’t new; it’s just never looked this good on a desk. Back in 1855, physicist Léon Foucault noticed that moving a magnet near a conductive disc created currents that pushed back against the motion. He called them eddy currents, and engineers have used the same principle in brakes and sensors ever since. MetMo just gave it a much better home.

Designers: Sean Sykes & James Whitfield

Click Here to Buy Now: $109.

Here’s the simple version: as the magnet drops through the copper tube, it stirs up little loops of electrical current in the metal around it. Those currents create their own magnetic field, one that opposes the fall. Gravity is still very much in charge; it’s just arguing with physics on the way down. No motors, no gears, no hidden switches, just two materials doing what they’ve always done.

Copper does more than look good here, though it certainly does that too. It happens to be one of the most conductive non-magnetic metals around, which means it generates a stronger eddy current response than most alternatives could manage. That translates to a more pronounced, more watchable slowdown. It also happens to give Eddy that warm, rose-toned glow that looks better on a desk than aluminum or steel could.

Every tube starts as a solid block of lead-free, ultra-high-purity copper before it’s CNC-machined to tolerances tight enough to bring the inner wall almost, but not quite, into contact with the magnetic sphere. That tiny gap matters: the closer the copper sits to the magnet, the stronger the eddy current effect, and the smoother the drop looks. Designed and finished by hand in the UK, the machining is the point.

Pick it up and the size makes sense immediately: just under 3 inches tall, less than an inch wide, and just 3 ounces, enough heft to feel substantial without weighing down a pocket. Knurled caps on both ends give your fingers something to grip, while the smooth, brushed middle section contrasts nicely against them. It’s the kind of detail that separates a toy from an object somebody actually designed.

A passivated surface finish keeps the copper looking freshly machined for longer, slowing down the natural oxidation that usually dulls exposed metal within weeks. Eddy will still age the way copper ages, gradually and with character, but it won’t need constant polishing to stay presentable on a desk. It’s a small, easy-to-miss detail, but it’s the sort of thing that tells you somebody thought this through past the prototype stage.

Maybe the most underrated part is that it makes zero noise. No click, no rattle, no thud when the magnet reaches the bottom, just silence. Flip it over, and the drop starts again, and before long that one-handed flip becomes a habit your fingers pick up between emails or during a call. It’s less a fidget toy and more a five-second reset button that happens to double as desk decor.

An elongated window cut into the tube lets you watch the magnet fall instead of guessing what’s happening inside, and that visibility is what makes the whole effect land. Unscrew either end cap, and there are a few different ways to drop and catch the ball. For a longer drop, a small coupling piece threads two tubes together end to end, without changing anything about how the effect works.

Some desk objects need explaining before anyone appreciates them. Eddy doesn’t. Hand it to someone, let them drop the magnet once, and watch their eyebrows go up when it takes way longer to fall than it should. That reaction doesn’t really wear off with repetition either, which says something about how good the underlying idea is, dressed up in copper and finished by hand.

Click Here to Buy Now: $109.

The post MetMo Eddy Makes Gravity Look Like It Changed Its Mind first appeared on Yanko Design.

At 556 feet, The Butterfly doesn’t just rise above Vancouver — it redefines what a skyscraper is allowed to feel like. Completed by Revery Architecture and developed by Westbank, the 57-story tower now stands as the third-tallest structure in the city, but its ambition runs deeper than height. Four interconnected cylindrical volumes, fused at a central elevator core, give the building its unmistakable silhouette — part sculpture, part organism, entirely its own thing.

The name earns its keep. Inspired by the ephemeral quality of clouds, the tower’s form was conceived to dissolve the rigid grammar of conventional high-rise architecture. Its façade — a tightly composed assembly of insulated prefabricated panels and white precast concrete fins — wraps around each cylinder with an undulating rhythm that shifts depending on where you’re standing. From a distance, it reads as one continuous gesture. Up close, it fragments into something far more intricate.

Designer: Revery Architecture

What sets The Butterfly apart isn’t just form — it’s the intent buried within it. Revery director Amirali Javidan described the project as an attempt to solve a genuine urban problem: social isolation in a city growing faster than its residents can connect. The tower’s open-air corridors, carved into the recesses between its cylindrical volumes, are oriented to capture Vancouver’s gentle coastal breezes and are lined with plant life. These aren’t just circulation spaces — they’re designed as pause points, places where neighbors might actually stop and talk.

The building’s relationship to its surroundings is equally considered. The Butterfly sits adjacent to First Baptist Church, a 1911 stone structure that anchors the gateway to Vancouver’s West End. Rather than overshadowing it, the tower responds to it. One of the building’s canopies hovers directly above the church, deliberately matching the height of the historic bell tower — a quiet act of architectural deference. The complex integrates the church’s programming, funding upgrades that allow it to continue offering meals, emergency care, and shelter for those in need.

Sustainability is woven into the bones of the project. Designed to LEED Gold standards and powered by an on-site low-carbon district energy plant, The Butterfly exceeds local benchmarks across energy, water, mobility, and waste. A glass-enclosed lap pool crowns the podium, framed by riblike precast concrete arches that feel closer to a natatorium than a rooftop amenity.

Sky gardens open through large glazed walls at the crown. Inside the suites, reflective surfaces and unbroken views are used deliberately — to create a sense of spatial continuity that encourages a feeling of unboundedness. Much like the building itself.

The post This Tower Solved a City’s Loneliness Problem — and Still Bowed to a 1911 Church first appeared on Yanko Design.

Anyone who has ever crawled under a standing desk at 6 a.m. trying to find an outlet knows the specific frustration of modern furniture. We’ve spent the last decade making our desks height-adjustable, our floor lamps articulated, our shelving modular, and somehow the humble power strip never got the memo. It just sits there, bolted to a fixed spot, forcing every cord in the room to stretch, sag, or dangle in whatever direction gets the job done.

That mismatch is the actual problem Swift Creatives set out to solve with Power Duck. When your desk goes up, the outlet doesn’t follow. When your lamp shifts, the plug stays put. You end up buying extension cords to bridge the gap, and then you end up hating the extension cords, because now there’s a tangle of cable running across the floor where someone is guaranteed to trip on it. Power Duck’s whole premise is simple: let the power source move with you instead of making you adjust around it.

Designer: Swift Creatives

The mechanism itself is almost embarrassingly obvious once you see it. A grey pole, shaped a bit like an angular coat hook, holds a mint green sleeve that slides freely up and down. Inside that sleeve sit four outlets. Raise the sleeve when you need power near shoulder height, lower it when you want it tucked near the floor, and the cord just loops along for the ride instead of getting yanked taut. It’s the kind of adjustable height mechanism you’d expect on a desk lamp, quietly borrowed and applied to something as unglamorous as a power strip.

What makes the concept stick in your head, though, is the face. One of the four outlets has been given a pair of googly eyes and an orange beak, turning it into a duck peeking out at whoever plugs something in. It’s a small, almost throwaway detail, but it does a lot of work. Power strips are objects we’re trained to ignore, to hide behind furniture, to feel a little embarrassed about when guests are over. Giving one a face flips that instinct. Suddenly it’s not clutter you’re apologizing for, it’s a character sitting on your desk.

I like this move because it says something honest about where product design is headed. For years, “good design” in tech accessories meant disappearing entirely, going matte black or brushed silver so nothing draws attention. Power Duck takes the opposite bet, leaning into color and personality instead of camouflage. That’s a riskier choice, since a cartoon face can read as gimmicky if the underlying function doesn’t hold up. Here it doesn’t feel like a gimmick bolted onto a boring product just to make it shareable. The sliding mechanism is the real idea, and the duck face is the thing that makes you actually want to look at it twice.

It’s also worth saying plainly that Power Duck is a concept out of Swift Creatives’ Innovation Lab, not a product sitting on a shelf at your local hardware store. Plenty of clever ideas like this live on Instagram and never make it past the prototype stage, and there’s no guarantee this one breaks that pattern. But that doesn’t make it less useful as a signal. Somebody looked at a genuinely mundane annoyance, the fixed-height outlet strip fighting against our increasingly adjustable furniture, and treated it as worth solving rather than shrugging off.

American homes and offices have quietly filled up with height-adjustable everything over the past several years, from standing desks to monitor arms to modular shelving, and our power infrastructure has never caught up. Power Duck is a small, almost funny reminder that the unglamorous parts of a room deserve the same design attention as the parts we actually show off. Whether this exact duck ever ends up on a store shelf matters less than the fact that someone bothered to ask why a power strip has to be the one static object in an otherwise flexible setup. That question feels overdue, and I hope more designers start asking it.

The post The Power Strip That Actually Moves With Your Desk first appeared on Yanko Design.

Fifty one years. That’s how long Wish You Were Here has been sitting in the canon, selling something like 20 million copies, topping the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, and generally being the album your dad puts on when he wants you to know he had a personality before you were born. In that same window, LEGO has given us a Fender Stratocaster, a Rolling Stones tongue, a Beatles mosaic, an Elvis portrait, and a grand piano that talks to your phone. Pink Floyd? Nothing. Not a brick. The band that basically invented album art as a medium, and LEGO has never once picked up the phone.

Funny enough, we’ve seen this exact gap close before. Back in 2020 we covered a scrappy little fan-made Stratocaster MOC chasing votes on LEGO Ideas, and a year later it was sitting on shelves as an official 1,074-piece retail set. Rustiest_Brick is running the same play now, except instead of a guitar he’s rebuilt the most famous handshake in rock history, one businessman calmly on fire, framed like a museum piece. Early days, sure, but so was the Strat once.

Designer: Rustiest_Brick

Two brick-built figures, roughly BrickHeadz-scale but fully posed and articulated, clasp hands in front of a glossy black tiled wall, one in cool grey, the other in a black suit with a white shirt and skinny tie. Trans-orange and amber flame pieces erupt off his shoulder, back and hat, and because they’re semi-transparent they actually catch light the way real flame photography does, which is a smarter solve than painting fire in brick would ever be. Rustiest_Brick has said he kept both figures deliberately stiff and manufactured looking rather than natural, and honestly, that’s the whole joke of the original photo anyway. Two men performing warmth while one of them burns.

The base doubles as a proper display plinth, with a framed platinum disc bolted to one side, the same George Hardie mechanical handshake logo from the actual 1975 shrink wrap sticker printed on its center label, and a UCS-style plaque up front reading Wish You Were Here. Slide that plaque out, though, and there’s a small trans-blue gem tucked in a hidden compartment behind it. Rustiest_Brick isn’t saying what it’s for outright, but if you know your Floyd lore, that’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond hiding in plain sight, a quiet nod to Syd Barrett folded into a set that’s supposedly just about a handshake. That’s my favorite detail here by a mile, the kind of thing only a genuine fan bothers to hide.

The project just went up on LEGO Ideas and currently sits at 120 supporters, with 425 days on the clock to reach the first 1,000-vote milestone before the real climb to 10,000 even starts. It’s a long road, but the Strat took one too. If you’d like to see Pink Floyd finally get their overdue LEGO moment, you can head over to the Ideas page and cast your vote. Just don’t let the wind change direction on your way there.

The post Pink Floyd has never gotten a LEGO set. This fan built the one everyone’s been waiting for first appeared on Yanko Design.

Amsterdam gets around 1,600 hours of sunshine a year. Los Angeles gets close to 2,500. Anne Berends spent years feeling that difference, which is a very common Dutch experience and a very uncommon reason to start a hardware company. She was a nanomaterials scientist, so rather than buying a lamp she asked herself, “What if I could mount a piece of the sun on top of my laptop, which I spend roughly 8 hours in front of everyday?” The answer was near-infrared, the invisible band that shoots out of your TV remote. Turns out, at the right wavelength and focus, it provides a similar physiological experience as being in the sun. Berends built a webcam-ish device that sits on top of your laptop/desktop screen, giving you that dose of “sunlight” you wouldn’t get in most northern countries between September and March.

I have had a unit from IFA 2026 clipped to my screen for roughly twenty days now. It is a 120 gram puck, 83mm across, aluminum and plastic, USB-C powered, with three LEDs running at 850nm. A presence sensor confirms you are between 30 and 100cm away and cuts the light the moment you leave the desk. Berends co-founded SunLED with lighting industry veteran Ayhan Siriner, out of the Amsterdam research lab Seaborough. It sells for $249 and carries a 2026 iF Design Award in Medical and Healthcare.

Designers: Dr. Anne Berends & Ayhan Siriner (SunLED Life Science)

SunLED did not start with a clip-on gadget. The original plan baked near-infrared into ceiling fixtures, so whole rooms got a dose without anyone changing habits. That idea collapsed under basic physics, since near-infrared only works on skin, and light scattered from three meters up wastes itself on the walls. Berends summed up what the ceiling version would require in one blunt line: you’d need a nuclear plant, basically. That is not a metaphor she reached for lightly. The whole product shrank from architecture down to arm’s length, landing on the surface everyone stares at for eight hours a day.

The product does not do anything you can perceive, which is the strangest part of the brief. No warmth, no glow, no hum. At MWC, SunLED’s team had to hand journalists a special viewer just to prove the beam was there, since 850 nanometers sits outside what human eyes register. Most companies faced with an invisible feature would have cheated and added a soft status light for reassurance. SunLED skipped that. What you get instead is a presence sensor that checks your distance, and an app that logs weekly exposure after the fact.

On the desk, the SunBooster reads less like a wellness gadget and more like a webcam that wandered off from a video call. That is deliberate, since it never screams self-care at anyone glancing at your monitor mid meeting. Compare that to the SAD lamps this category grew up on, glowing slabs you sit in front of like you are serving a sentence. Or compare it to red light panels, which mix visible red with near-infrared and demand a timed session standing in front of them. SunBooster skips the ritual and the spectacle both.

The science leans on a study from the University of Groningen, double-blind and placebo-controlled: participants reported better mood after a single day, most pronounced in winter, and more energy after four weeks. A separate UBC study found near-infrared exposure improved emotional stability under demanding cognitive tasks. None of that is nothing, for a category that usually runs on vibes over citations. I will admit upfront that I live somewhere the sun works unpaid overtime year round, so whether this does anything for a hypothetical Dutch February version of me, I genuinely cannot tell. What I can report is that it has never once made my desk feel cluttered, which is more than most wellness gadgets manage.

The standalone device might not even be the real plan here. SunLED has shown concept hardware alongside it, including a phone case with the same LEDs built in and a laptop with near-infrared woven into the display housing. The company is licensing the tech to monitor and laptop makers, and Berends has pitched it as adding roughly the cost of a Netflix subscription to a device’s bill of materials. If that lands with even one major laptop brand, the object on my screen stops being a product and becomes a proof of concept that shipped first. That is bigger ambition than most $249 gadgets carry.

Winning an iF Design Award for a wellness gadget is not rare anymore, the category has gotten crowded with panels and pods chasing the same jury. What sets the SunBooster apart is that it never asked to look like medicine. It looks like hardware, sized and finished the way a camera accessory would be, sitting on a bezel instead of a bathroom shelf. If SunLED pulls off the licensing play, this unit gets remembered less as a product and more as the pitch deck that worked. Until then, it sits on my monitor, doing something I will never see, for a winter I will never have to survive.

The post This $249 Clip-on Device Shines ‘Invisible’ Infrared Sunlight On You To Boost Your Mood first appeared on Yanko Design.

Every few months, I go down the rabbit hole of homes for sale that promise total escape without an actual commitment to distance. The pitch is always some version of “close to the city, far from everything else,” and it rarely delivers. What usually shows up is a subdivision with a few extra trees or a renovated farmhouse that swapped one kind of sameness for another. That gap between what people want (real quiet, real nature, real character) and what’s actually on the market is the exact problem the Woods Home in Yorktown Heights solves, and it does it without pretending the answer is another gray-and-white farmhouse flip.

Built in 1966, the Woods Home sits on 6.74 wooded acres in Westchester County, perched on the property’s own natural rock outcroppings. It’s a four-sided A-frame, which is rarer than it sounds. Most A-frames top out as cozy ski cabins under 1,500 square feet. This one stretches to nearly 5,000, with four bedrooms and two bathrooms, soaring ceilings, and walls of glass that turn every room into a framed view of the trees. Listing agent Douglas Dill of Houlihan Lawrence put it plainly when he said he’s sold plenty of A-frames, just never one this size, with this much acreage and this much light. That’s not sales talk. That combination genuinely doesn’t come up often.

What makes the place feel honest rather than staged is that it was actually lived in, not flipped for a listing photo shoot. The current owners bought it three decades ago as a weekend retreat from Manhattan and eventually made it their full-time home. That kind of ownership shows. The kitchen has updated granite counters, sure, but the bones are untouched: the wood paneling, the built-in shelving, the sliding glass doors that open the lower level straight onto a patio and a pool tucked below the house. There’s a second living area set up as a rec room with its own deck, bedrooms with private balconies, even a small potting shed and a garage converted into an artist’s studio. None of it feels added for resale value. It feels like a family actually used every inch of it.

The price is $1.7 million, which will read as either shocking or refreshingly reasonable depending on which coast you’re comparing it to. For a house this distinct, on this much land, an hour from Manhattan by train, I’d argue it’s the second one. You’re not paying for granite and crown molding. You’re paying for a genuine piece of midcentury design history that never got gutted, plus a rock outcropping and a swimming pool most suburban lots twice the price can’t offer.

I’ll admit a small bias here. Midcentury homes that survive fifty-plus years without losing their identity are becoming harder to find, especially near major cities where land value tempts owners to tear down and build something forgettable but bigger. Every time one of these shows up still intact, it feels like a small win against that pattern. The Woods Home never got flattened into a colonial or stretched into a McMansion. It stayed exactly what it was built to be: a bold, slightly eccentric retreat that trusts its architecture instead of hiding it.

What I actually appreciate most is that the house doesn’t ask you to choose between wilderness and convenience. You get the boulders, the deck views, the sense of being tucked into a forest, and you still get a train that pulls you into Manhattan when you need it. That balance is rarer than people admit, and it’s why listings like this one tend to move fast once word gets around. If you’ve ever wanted proof that a genuine escape and a short commute aren’t mutually exclusive, this one hour, wooded acre by wooded acre, quietly makes the case.

The post A Hidden $1.7M A-Frame That’s Actually an Hour From NYC first appeared on Yanko Design.

Most desk objects disappear the moment they do their job. A stapler staples. A tape dispenser dispenses. A pencil sharpener sharpens, and then it goes back to being a small plastic or metal box that nobody looks at twice. That is the actual problem MB&F and Caran d’Ache set out to fix with their new GorillaSharpener, a device that takes the most forgettable tool on any desk and turns it into something you would rather display than hide in a drawer.

The design comes from Maximilian Maertens at MB&F, the Geneva-based outfit better known for building watches that look like they escaped a spaceship. Here, they have grafted a set of muscular, knuckle-walking gorilla limbs onto Caran d’Ache’s classic desktop sharpening machine, the kind of hand-crank sharpener that has sat in Swiss schoolrooms for decades. The arms and legs are cast in chrome-plated zinc alloy and steel, textured to mimic coarse fur, and they lift the sharpener’s body into a forward-leaning stance, as if it is about to charge across your desk. It stands about 150mm tall, finished in a pale Alpine Frost blue that somehow makes the whole thing look calmer than it has any right to.

Designer: Maximillian Maertens

I like objects that admit they are having fun without apologizing for it. This is one of them. It is limited to 300 pieces, priced at CHF 850 plus tax, which works out to roughly $1,165 in the US. That is an absurd amount of money for something that puts a point on a pencil, and MB&F seems to know it. Their own materials describe it as the least expensive thing the brand has ever made, which tells you everything about the company’s usual price range and nothing about whether this thing is worth it. Function still matters here, though. It takes round or hexagonal pencils between 4 and 10mm, the cutter is interchangeable, and it comes with a clamp so it can actually be mounted to a desk rather than just posed on one.

What makes this release land, at least for me, is the timing and the reasoning behind it. It launched on September 24th, World Gorilla Day, and it is not the first time these two brands have played in this space. In 2024, MB&F gave a DinoSharpener to its collector community as a gift, dressing the same base machine in dinosaur legs instead. Before that, back in 2016, Caran d’Ache and MB&F built Astrograph, a rocket-shaped writing instrument. The GorillaSharpener continues that pattern, but it also marks 15 years of M.A.D.Gallery, MB&F’s platform for mechanical art, which explains why this piece leans harder into sculpture than the earlier ones did.

There is also a cause attached, and it does not feel bolted on for marketing points. MB&F has partnered with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, symbolically adopting the historic Pablo mountain gorilla group in Rwanda, with proceeds supporting field protection teams and conservation research. A silly desk toy funding actual gorilla conservation is the kind of pairing that should feel forced and somehow does not.

Every piece ships in its own case with an instruction booklet, the securing clamp, and a set of Caran d’Ache pencils packaged in artwork by illustrator Maxime Schertenleib, built around MB&F’s own line about creativity: a creative adult is a child who survived. That phrase does a lot of explaining. Nobody actually needs a gorilla to sharpen a pencil. Plenty of us do it just fine with a two-dollar plastic version from the drugstore. But there is a difference between an object that works and one that makes you want to sharpen a pencil you did not need sharpened, just to watch the arms do their thing.

Design like this will not solve anything important, and it is not trying to. What it does is remind you that even the most utilitarian corner of a desk can still hold a little bit of wonder, and that sometimes the best response to a boring object is to give it arms.

The post An $1,165 Pencil Sharpener That Refuses to Stay Boring first appeared on Yanko Design.

Most gaming controllers are built for an idea of a hand, not an actual one. They’re symmetrical, boxy, covered in ridges meant to accommodate everyone equally, which usually means they fit no one particularly well. After a few hours, your palms cramp, your thumbs ache, and if you’ve been playing anything remotely intense, your grip starts sliding around from sweat. It’s a problem the industry has mostly solved by adding more buttons rather than rethinking the shape itself.

Designer Jiayi Wu’s concept, PALMIO, starts from a different question entirely: what if the controller was shaped around the hand instead of the other way around? The result looks less like a gamepad and more like a smooth stone or a teardrop, something you’d pick up off a beach rather than off a store shelf. It’s a small shift in thinking that ends up changing almost everything about how the object reads.

Designer: Jiayi Wu

The body curves and tapers, wide at one end and narrowing into a grip that sits low in the palm. Rather than the usual two-handed symmetrical layout, PALMIO appears designed for one-handed use, closer in spirit to VR motion controllers than a traditional Xbox or PlayStation pad. That alone makes it feel less like an accessory and more like a tool you’d hold the way you’d hold a flashlight or a whisk, something with a clear front and back, a natural way in.

Sitting on top is an oversized circular thumb control, a ring with a raised center that dominates the upper half of the form. It’s an unusual choice to make one input the visual centerpiece of an entire product, but it works because it mirrors how your thumb naturally lands when you pick the thing up. You’re not hunting for a joystick buried among six other buttons. There’s one obvious place for your thumb to go, and the design just gets out of the way after that.

Where the grip meets the palm, a diamond-textured silicone panel breaks up the otherwise glossy shell. It’s a practical fix for slipping hands during a tense match, sure, but it also does something quieter: it tells you where to hold the controller without a single word of instruction. Your hand just goes there. That kind of tactile signage, using texture instead of labels or diagrams, is the sort of detail that separates a design exercise from a genuine product idea.

Then there’s the color story. Cream, sage green, powder blue. None of it screams “gamer” in the way we’ve come to expect from black shells with red accents and aggressive angles. I don’t think that’s an accident, and I don’t think it’s a bad instinct either. Gaming has quietly outgrown its own aesthetic stereotypes for years now, and hardware is only just catching up. A controller that looks like it belongs on a shelf next to a diffuser or a nice speaker isn’t a compromise. It’s an acknowledgment that the people playing games look nothing like the imagined teenager in a dark room that hardware design has been chasing for two decades.

What keeps PALMIO from feeling like a pretty rendering with no substance behind it are the exploded and cutaway views Wu included. Screws holding the battery cover in place, a visible circuit board, a joystick mechanism nested into the shell. Someone thought about how this would actually be built, not just how it would look in a hero shot.

To be clear, PALMIO is a concept, built and visualized digitally, with no functional prototype yet. Comfort claims and control feel are still theoretical until someone actually holds one for an hour-long session. But the direction it points toward, gaming hardware that takes the human hand as seriously as it takes frame rates, is one worth paying attention to regardless of whether this exact object ever ships.

The post The Gaming Controller That Refuses to Look Like One first appeared on Yanko Design.