Offices keep buying furniture that looks permanent, which works fine until someone needs the room to do something different. A workshop space becomes a presentation area, a meeting room needs to turn into individual work zones, and nobody wants to wait three days for facilities to show up with screwdrivers. The furniture just sits there looking expensive and immovable while everyone works around it instead of with it.
PIXEL by Bene is designer Didi Lenz’s answer, and it looks almost suspiciously simple. Each piece is a 36 x 36 cm cube made from raw pine plywood with visible grain and knots all over the surface. Lenz says it isn’t really furniture, which makes sense when you see people stacking them into benches, flipping them into tables, or just using one as a side storage box with a handle cut into the side.
Designer: Didi Lenze (Bene)
The wood is completely untreated, so every cube looks slightly different depending on which part of the tree it came from. Some have dark knots near the corners, others show lighter grain patterns, and the plywood edges are exposed instead of hidden under veneer. It definitely reads as workshop material rather than corporate office product, which seems to be the whole point. You can see the screws holding the corners together.
The cubes stack easily because they’re all the same size, and the cutout handles on two sides let you carry them around or fold them over to connect boxes side by side. Add a white laminate top and a stack becomes a work table. Add casters to the bottom, and it rolls wherever you need it. PIXEL Rack adds metal frames that turn stacks into proper shelving or room dividers with slots for whiteboards and plants.
Bene shows photos of teams building entire project rooms by hand. Boxes stacked three high become benches for workshops, racks filled with boxes create semi-transparent walls between work zones, and tops laid across stacks turn into standing height tables. The setups look intentionally unfinished, like someone is still building them, which is probably the aesthetic Lenz wanted. Nothing looks bolted down or precious.
The system works because it assumes people will move things around themselves without asking permission. You need more seating for a presentation, so you grab some boxes from the storage wall and stack them into rows. The presentation ends, and those same boxes become side tables or go back to holding supplies. Heck, they can turn into a bar for an event if you add the right tops.
Raw plywood has obvious trade-offs. It’ll get dinged and stained over time, the surface isn’t smooth enough for detailed work, and the workshop look won’t suit every office brand. The fixed 36 cm dimension means everything is the same height whether you’re sitting, standing, or storing things, which can feel awkward. Some people will look at PIXEL and just see fancy storage crates, which isn’t entirely wrong.
But the system makes sense for spaces that need to change shape constantly. Co-working areas, design studios, classrooms, and pop-up shops can rebuild their layout between sessions without calling anyone. The wood looks honest and approachable instead of intimidating, and you don’t need instructions to figure out that boxes stack. PIXEL by Bene basically gives you building blocks that happen to be office furniture, or maybe it’s the other way around.
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