“Creating designs that are anything but boring” is the line Liam de la Bedoyere chose for the bio of Bored Eye Design, his independent studio based in Essex. A British industrial designer, he works on furniture and homeware with an ironic, experimental eye. Even the name is a play on words, since Bored Eye is in fact an anagram of his surname.
His latest project is called Popsticks, a pair of inflatable chopsticks. Deflated, they roll up and fit in a pocket. Inflated, they become two translucent tubes that recall the look of 1990s inflatables. The project comes from the Inflatable prompt of Productober, but Liam decided not to stop at the sketch and to actually develop it. In this way, a utensil with ancient roots takes on the lightness of a toy, without giving up its primary function.
Popsticks is not an exception. The same design idea has accompanied Liam for some time and can be recognised in very different projects.
The Lumen Chair (2025) is a chair that doubles as a lamp. The hollow-cast metal frame conceals the wiring, a spherical light is mounted on one side of the backrest and the switch sits on the opposite side, a choice that breaks symmetry. Rechargeable batteries are hidden in the legs, so the chair can be moved wherever it is needed, with no cables and no tripping hazards.
With Grid, the protagonist is the umbrella stand, usually the most overlooked object in a home. Liam starts from wine racks and designs a lattice of yellow tubes that holds umbrellas at several points. The interwoven lines make it look like a small sculpture, and the umbrellas become part of the composition.
Lightamals begins with the sketch of a flamingo that immediately made Liam think of a table lamp, which would later be named the F-Lamp. The flamingo was soon joined by a giraffe, a snake and the Loch Ness monster.
The Vizcom team noticed the flamingo and asked Liam to imagine the next tubular animal and present a working prototype at San Francisco Design Week. The result is called Duke, a desk lamp inspired by a duck and built from bent tubular elements, halfway between a functional object and a small character.
The Dog Hut Bed, instead, comes from everyday life with a dog. Liam adds a house-shaped headboard to an oak bed, with space inside for the dog to sleep. The bed stays low so the animal can climb up without effort, and the slope of the headboard lets you lean back to read.
From the glowing chair to the inflatable chopsticks, the method is always the same. With Bored Eye Design, Liam takes an object that is often taken for granted and turns it into something extraordinary.
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