I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what separates furniture that you simply own from furniture that you actually feel something about. Most pieces fall squarely in the first category. They hold your things, fill your space, and eventually end up in someone else’s apartment. But every once in a while, a collection comes along that makes you want to know the story behind it. The Squares, designed by Xiaoya Wang and Jian Ni of One Week Design, is that kind of collection.
The origin story alone is worth sitting with. The design is rooted in a personal memory: Wang’s father worked for a construction company that built small houses, and she occasionally joined him on the job, learning to lay bricks. Ensuring each wall was perfectly plumb, each brick snug against its neighbor, each layer bound by mortar. That ritual, repeated countless times, forged a core belief: objects are vessels of memory. That’s not a new idea, but Wang and Ni have translated it into something tangible and deeply specific.
Designers: Xiaoya Wang & Jian Ni (One Week Design)
That specificity is where the collection gets interesting. The design exercised extreme restraint, strictly planning every dimension as a multiple of a 5x5cm square. It sounds almost obsessive, and maybe it is, but the result is furniture that feels completely resolved. The chair is reduced to its essence: four legs, a seat, and a back. Nothing more. That kind of restraint is genuinely hard to pull off. Minimalism often reads as cold or indifferent, but The Squares has warmth baked into it precisely because the discipline behind it comes from somewhere real.
The design process mirrored childhood block-building: starting from chaos and moving toward order through a relentless search for harmony. You can see that in the finished pieces. The forms are architectural without being austere, geometric without feeling mechanical. The surface detail is what pushes it over the edge. The wooden construction features subtly convex surfaces on every block, which catch the light to create shimmering highlights, enhancing the vibrant colors or finishes. It’s a quiet trick that rewards a second look, and a third.
What keeps The Squares from tipping into a pure exercise in restraint is the color. The collection is available in a range of bold, saturated finishes: yellows that practically vibrate, deep crimsons, inky blacks, soft naturals. Beneath its austere exterior, the collection surprises with luminous finishes and bold colors, introducing a note of playful whimsy. I think that’s an accurate read, and I’d add that it gives the collection an unusual flexibility for something so formally rigid. A white Squares chair in a quiet corner reads as sculptural and calm. The same chair in acid yellow is a full statement.
Constructed from solid ash wood with a water-based paint finish, the pieces have a physical presence that photos almost undersell. The wood grain shows through certain finishes in a way that reminds you these are handcrafted objects, not manufactured units. The series currently comprises chairs, benches, stools, and mirrors, available in a variety of colors. The stool, the bench, the mirror — they all carry that same weight and intention. You get the sense that every piece in this family was considered with the same level of care as the chair.
One Week Design plans to expand this family in the future, exploring the endless possibilities of the square. I’m curious to see where that goes, because the vocabulary Wang and Ni have built feels like it has real range. The square is, after all, one of the most elemental forms there is, and they’ve already shown how much meaning you can pack into it when you take it seriously.
Good design often tells you what something is. Great design tells you where it came from. The Squares does both, which is why it’s one of the more memorable collections I’ve come across recently. It looks like order. It feels like memory. And it sits like a chair that knows exactly what it is.
The post One Week Design’s Squares Furniture Is Built on a Bricklayer’s Memory first appeared on Yanko Design.