Amona Lab’s Wildly Different Take on Domestic Furniture

A new Chinese company called Amona Lab has debuted their wildly different take on domestic furniture. They’ve designed a line of modular storage units that’s unlike anything I’ve seen in the West—at least in the domestic space. In my eyes, the company’s style borrows from laboratories, examination rooms, industrial kitchens and even garages. I find it oddly appealing: It’s such an interesting take. They don’t do upper cabinets, instead opting for pegboard-style open storage. Down below, everything touching the floor is on wheels. They use metal, glass and wood. The look is clean, almost Spartan, and relentlessly honest; there’s no attempt to add artificial decoration. The form is the form, and I’d say they’ve got the proportions right, even when mating unlikely components.To a Westerner, marketing-speak translated from Chinese is a bit difficult to parse; the culture seems to demand ample poetry in copy, which can make discerning design intent difficult. So take what you will from Amona’s description of the furniture: Amona does not produce traditional furniture such as sofas, beds, tables and chairs. We always focus on “intelligence, fun and tranquility,” trying to respond to a more contemporary lifestyle. [We] focus on creating a home series that is “movable, combinable and growing.” We hope each Amona product is a small exploration of “life can be played this way.” The brand has just launched this month, and the photographs you see were shot in their newly-opened “Home Experience Store” in Henan. It remains to be seen whether they’re aiming to go international. I hope they do, mainly because I’m curious to see how the Western market would respond to the brand’s unusual style.