Chairs, carpets and blinds cleared from homes in the wake of deaths, divorces and bankruptcies form the raw material for these stools by Dutch designer Joost Gehem (+ slideshow).
The hundreds of thousands of deaths, divorces, bankruptcies and hospitalisations each year leave many household inventories without a home, says Joost Gehem of the inspiration behind his Transformation and Distribution Centre for Abandoned Household Items.
"You cannot imagine how cheap a complete interior can be and how much of it you can get," he told Dezeen. "I began to see it as a material and I saw a little factory in my mind."
Gehem found an advertisement for the clearance of a house owned by an elderly couple – the wife had passed away and the husband was about to go into a nursing home.
He bought up the whole interior and ground up carpets, window blinds, foam, textiles and a rattan chair.
The chipped remnants were then placed in a mould and pressed into stools.
Gehem is currently working on improving the process and a new line of products is planned for later this year.
Last week we featured a project to transform waste plastic picked up by fishing trawlers into chairs, while in 2008, architect Greg Lynn won a Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale for a series of furniture made from recycled children's toys.
We've also published lots of stools, including one inspired by glass beakers used in science experiments and a set of narrow A-shaped stools that fit together to make a bench.
Here's some more information from Gehem:
As a consequence of the approximately 135,000 deaths, 32,236 divorces, 10,000 bankruptcies and thousands of cases of hospitalisation that occur each year, many household inventories are left without a home. If heirs and dealers have no interest in the household goods, they usually end up in the local dump. Joost Gehem views these leftover house inventories as raw materials. His Transformation and Distribution Centre for Abandoned Household Items grinds down furniture and turns them into new products. Your old inventory gets a fresh new start, in a new shape: the Centre infuses new life into the cycle of collecting and throwing away.