Young furniture designers come up with such creative ideas. It’s amazing to think that for some things, like tables and chairs, whose functions basically remain the same, they invent ways to make them more interesting – to stand out from the crowd. They create new designs, use materials in innovative ways, and make furniture a bit more fun to use.

Take, for example, the one I came across at culturepush.com: The Mitosis chair by a young Chinese designer named Zhang Lihui. I certainly have not seen any café area chairs like it. At first I thought it was an odd name for a chair. Then I looked it up and saw that mitosis is the scientific term for the process in which chromosomes are duplicated in a cell’s nucleus, resulting in two daughter nuclei that are identical. Well, that makes sense somehow in relation to the Zhang Lihui’s chair.

At first glance, all you’ll see is a wooden chair that’s almost stark in its simplicity. But hidden within the wooden structure is another chair, this time made of glass. A drawer mechanism is employed to slide the top chair to reveal the glass one underneath. I guess you could call that replication somehow, though not in the biochemical sense. This chair would be a great conversation piece at home and in a commercial setting, but perhaps having a glass chair as bar room furniture isn’t too good an idea.

The artist, Zhang Lihui has a degree in furniture design, and she describes her design philosophy as simple yet imbued with a smidgen of fun and a bit of intrigue. I’m glad young designers like her and many others are creating products that bring interesting twists and turns to basic chairs and tables, whether they’re used for the home, as commercial café furniture, or hotel bedroom furnishings.