Daniel Michalik is a Rhode Island-based designer who focuses on creating furniture using overlooked materials in an environmentally sustainable way. Which sounds a helluva lot sexier than saying he made a children's chair out of crushed up bottle stoppers.
But that's just what he did. The Cub is made from molded cork that is a waste by-product of the bottle stopper industry. He's developed a way to bond it [using a non-toxic, environmentally friendly binding agent] into "a dense, unusual texture that's highly attractive and intriguing to the eyes and hands of young children."
I certainly hope the binding agent's non-toxic, because given the way my kid chews through our endless supply of cork Ikea placemats, her Cub's gonna have big bite marks out of it before the globe warms another degree.
Cub Children's Chair, $138 at Branch , who also have a nice selection of sustainably produced kid's toys and blankets [branchhome.com]
Daniel Michalik studio site [danielmichalik.com]
We saw this guy's cork chaise lounge at Haute Green in Brooklyn. Cool stuff. That price is a pleasant surprise too, although I guess this thing is pretty small.
[I've been impressed by the Sway cork stool myself. and the Cub is only 17" high, I think. He talks about it as a step, size-wise, in his experiments to cast adult-sized furniture from cork. -ed.]