Clever Combination Bookshelf & Wall Lamp Design

Lamps and books are virtually inseparable within a house, so why not build a home for both in the same furniture design move? The Lili Lite lamp bookshelf automates things a step further: when you lift your open book off the top of the lamp portion the light turns on, and when you are finished reading and put it back (still open to the new page you are reading) it turns back off.

In addition to the combination lamp/shelf device there is additional storage for more books – a side angled shelving area to accommodate volumes you haven’t gotten to yet, which also provides visual balance to the overall pinwheel composition of the entire set. All in all, for just over a hundred dollars this is quite a clever and useful shelving system for any avid reader.

Read & Roll: Clever Combination Chair & Bookcase Design

We all have favorite reading rooms and spots, but as daylight changes or our mood shifts would it not be nice to move not only ourselves but our seats and book collections as well?

Nils Holger Moormann is no stranger to unique-but-functional one-off and offbeat design ideas. At first glance these seem like strange designs, but shown in context they appear right at home.

The original lounge-chair-with-bookshelves combination was designed with all kinds of niches in mind, from hand-ready right-in-front book storage to additional side shelves for even more volumes.

The leaner follow-up design is simple, streamlined and further emphasizes the combined aesthetics of of the minimalist bookworm with those of the automobile afficienado.

Recycled Books Turned into Creative Bookcase Designs

At This to That, there is a bit of role reversal going on – books become the shelves for more books, recycled, reused and recombined in clever and sometimes satirical ways to support collections of even more books (or something else entirely as shown in the strangely inverted set of wood blocks-on-books pictured above).

Sometimes the sequence of titles tells a story while in other cases a common aesthetic runs through each book in a given shelf assembly – color, contrast and other characteristics telling a visual story.

Sometimes, the creator of these offbeat shelves ventures even further from the beaten path of bookcase design and into funky furniture or other recombined odds and ends, though book s remain a central theme throughout most of his work.

Make Your Own Upside-Down Bookshelves

How often do you see a really neat design online, get excited and then say to yourself “well, that’s great but I can’t afford it”? This upside-down bookshelf design was created with you in mind: easy to make and a great way to add something unconventional to home.

Some elastic, a board, brackets and a stapler are the essential elements to this remarkably simple bookshelf project. In short: this is made of stuff that many of us already have on hand or can purchase inexpensively at any hardware store.

The result: a book shelf that holds as few or as many books as you want quite easily, appears to ‘hang’ them impossibly above and does no damage to your favorite volumes. Books are also easy to add to and remove from the finished wood shelf.

Literal Tree House: Hollow Log Cabin + Huge Mobile Home

A log cabin, tree house or mobile home for sale on eBay for $12,000 already sounds like a steal – but this brilliant buy featured all three combined (well, at least if you are willing to work loosely with architectural vocabulary regarding cabins, trees and homes).

The comfortably warm wooden exterior, to be fair, gives way to a somewhat run-down fixer-upper on the interior. Still, at 42 feet long with 450 cozy square feet of living space inside and an outside shaped like a giant log and and all of it on wheels, who would not be tempted purchase such a strange one-off wonder of the world?

Originally created as a vehicle to promote tourism by the forestry service of Tasmania, this strange structure will still require some post-sale work if it is to be a fully-outfitted portable house. However, it is off to a good start with well-insulated interior already lightly decorated and at least complete with light fixtures. Of course, it could also be parked and used as a guest house, supplemental living area or unique playroom for children to augment an existing fixed-location residence.

Garbage Truck or Luxury Offroad Mobile Home?

Yes, it looks like an industrial-strength urban garbage truck – but inside it is stylish, even luxurious, in its accommodations with sink, stove and stairs to a second story for sleeping.  It is an all-terrain exploration and mobile living vehicle on the outside – you can even strap your motorbike to the back – but on the inside it is cozy and elegant in its design simplicity. More than just a travel vehicle, however, it is billed as a home on wheels – a self-sufficient living space with bedroom, bathroom, office, lounge and more – perfect for the adventurous freelancer or man on the run.

Truck Home: Turn Oil Tanker Trucks to Slick Trailer Homes

There are many marvelous ideas for turning old buildings into new habitable structures, but unless the existing units are modular the plans can rarely apply to multiple similar structures over time. A creative variant on the now-classic cargo container home concept, this rather brilliant design idea by Aristede Antonas not only can be used and reused like a standardized sea shipping container, but suggests a possible upcycling strategy for what may well be another (even-more) quickly-dying breed of land vehicle.

Every piece is in place to convert these giant cylinders into cozy mobile homes without too much trouble. For starters, each unit comes in two pieces – the truck front could be detached while the back bed is parked somewhere, perhaps even within a community of similar conversions. Also, these spaces are already by necessity structurally stable, completely waterproof and well-insulated.

Of course, it would not hurt to add some skylights and windows – nor would it be possible to avoid cutting into the hulls to create doorways. However, all in all, fitting an old oil tank with built-in bedroom, bathroom and minimalist living room furniture would obviously be much easier than trying outfit a more typical mid-sized truck or extra-large car for residential purposes.

The typology of a gas-carrying truck is most directly tied to our use of fossil fuels, but if you take the green theme to a further extreme: one could imagine that by using more local liquids (milk, etc… ) the need for long-term transit vehicles to ship these would also diminish. In short, sustainability and eco-friendly living calls for less transportation in general … which would make a massive number of these trucks available for this kind of awesome adaptive reuse project.

A Beautiful House Made from Trash & Recycled Materials

Driftwood railings line the rickety bridge leading to the cattle-bone numbers next to the front door of this unique recycled home – featuring far more than the sum of its scraps and parts, a beauty that emerges from the textured materials of which it was made (by hand).

It starts with stacked corks and bottles, old newspapers, scrap wood and recycled metal … and culminates in layered color-sample ceiling tiles and  shards of mirrored glass arranged piece by piece to assemble an amazing interior wall mosaic.

Old t-shirts form the floors in one room while an antique wood-burning stove adorns the next and glass wine bottles allow light and distorted views from one space to another.

Less an interior design or decorating project and more a work of collaborative art, it is clear that each contributor to the construction process added their own custom (and often unplanned) elements.

The exterior, of course, has to meet certain minimum functional requirements and thus the restrictions on materials were greater – yet recycled roof tiles and cork-based walls make for a durable but colorful and animated set of outside surfaces.

If the aesthetic is different from anything you have seen, it is because the attitude and approach here are as well. This is not about a fixed step-by-step home planned from start to finish, fixed layouts or amounts of materials, but about creative evolution, participation and community construction.

Recycled Glass House: 6 Million Bottles of Beer in the Walls

You would have to multiple the “ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall” from the old tune by six hundred thousand to make this whole glass home. It took one artistic builder nearly two decades to complete this eclectic project, constructing it piece by piece – as much a never-ending work of sculpture or do-it-yourself scrap-pile as a house.

Some of the wall work is structural but much is decorative . There is no clean line between function and decor, as a sturdy and solid glass, mud and cement surface gives way to towers, ornaments and abstracted gargoyles that dot almost the entire property.

It is not just the bottles: hub caps, old bicycles and other metal, plastic and glass odds and ends have likewise become entangled in this weaved web of recycled wonders.

Of course, while he did most of the building on his own, it ‘takes a village’ to raise something on the scale of this amazing recycled home. Buenos Aires artist Tito Ingerieri relied on friends, families and neighbors to save and send him their used bottles – a process that became as second-nature as setting out the trash over the years of construction. As a strange sort of thank you gift back to the region: when the south winds blow the home sounds the alarm through whistling glass walls, alerting residents and locals to a higher-than-average flood potential.

5 Kinds of Creative Recycled Architecture: Bottles, Cans and Other Unusual Building Materials

Have you ever thought of recycling as a creative act? To recycle something doesn’t necessarily mean just hauling used bottles, cans and cardboard to the curbside for pickup. Some creative people, either out of need or personal interest have taken the notion of recycling to the next level, using products that would be melted or shredded as whole objects in the construction of creative new buildings.




Bottle walls sounds like something a quirky eccentric would construct just for fun. In point of fact, the oldest surviving bottle house was constructed out of over 50,000 beer bottles in 1907, due to the lack of lumber available in the deeserts of Nevada. Though many bottle buildings are decades old, recent structures around the world have been built out of necessity in places where both building supplies are scarce and other recycling methods are unavailable.


The now-famous Texas beer can house, however, was indeed the result of one man’s eccentricity. What began as one man’s bored urge in the 1960s resulted in a 2-decade, 40,000-can creation that truly is a strange wonder of the world. John, the house’s creator, is survived by his wife Mary, who still invites the public to come and see his amazing creation. John was just an ordinary man who saved beer bottles for years, until he finally came up with a clever way to use them. The latter two images above come via The Beer Can House dot Org.

A cardboard house may seem even more implausible than one constructed of beer cans. With the right water-proofing, however, just such a house would be not only sustainable but also exceedingly affordable. This so-called house of the future is designed with exterior waterproofing and water storage under the floor to protect it from the water and from blowing over in the wind. Of course, cardboard is also a highly collapsible building material, making the shipment of the house also more environmentally friendly, efficient and inexpensive.

Tire houses are arguably more practical and ultimately realistic than cardboard buildings. Used tires are abundant in our oil-driven world where vehicles are common and changing tires is a fact of life. The thermal mass of a tire wall works well in summer or winter, mitigating the exterior and interior temperatures so the house is never too cold or too hot inside. Construction can also be accomplished by the home owner with relative ease.


Straw bale houses also make use of a common and regularly sized material that is relatively available and inexpensive. This regularity makes working with the building blocks relatively easy. Many such houses, once they are completed and covered outside and in, do not even look to be made of straw.