Furniture storage is one of those problems that design has mostly surrendered to square footage. You either have room for a stool, or you don’t, and folding alternatives have historically resolved that with compromise: wobbly joints, hard edges, the kind of utilitarian resignation that makes it obvious the piece exists to disappear rather than be used. The Press Stool starts from a different premise, borrowing its structural logic not from joinery or hardware but from the physics of folded paper.
The concept begins with a simple observation: a flat sheet of paper has no load-bearing strength on its own, but folding it generates rigidity. Crease a sheet, and the forces redistribute across the form. Press the folds, and the geometry resists compression. This is the same principle behind accordion-style bellows folding in classic cameras, where pressing the structure generates mechanical force. Here, that same force is redirected toward something you can sit on.
Designer: Jaehyun Bae
In its flat state, the stool collapses into a wide, deflated oval roughly 610 mm wide and 520 mm deep, with gently curved sides and pinched, gathered ends where the material compresses to a narrow tip. The metallic silver material has a pronounced crinkled texture that lands somewhere between industrial foil and fabric. It ships flat. It weighs little.
Pressing the form open deploys it into a three-dimensional stool standing 530 mm tall, with two flanking vertical panels and a concave seat formed by the inward curve at the top. No latches, no assembly. The structural resistance comes entirely from the geometry of the fold itself, the way a creased sheet can bear more than expected when compressed along its axis. The fold-generated tension does the structural work that legs and frames usually handle.
That argument holds up as a concept, though the prototype leaves practical questions open. Material identity isn’t explicitly documented, load capacity is unspecified, and the crinkle finish that gives the piece its visual identity is also the surface most exposed to wear. A stool takes more daily abuse than most objects that look like they belong in a gallery, and the long-term resilience of the material composite is untested in any published form.
What’s clear is the conceptual economy. Form follows mechanism follows idea, without detour. Flat objects that become structural through pressing rather than assembly represent a genuinely interesting class of design problem, and the Press Stool makes that problem visible and tangible. How far the logic scales beyond a prototype is the question that follows it out of the studio.
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