In Paris, designer Stanislas Derrey is building a language that brings together material experimentation, reuse, and conceptual lightness. Each of his projects starts from a simple gesture — a tension, an interlock, a compression — that becomes a reflection on how we inhabit objects and spaces.
The most recent series, Cartoon, presented during Paris Design Week, is the clearest expression of this philosophy. Derrey has devised a furniture system that turns old comics and magazines into furnishing elements. At its heart is a small cross-shaped joint, 3D-printed in bioplastic and designed to fit the standard width of a comic book. From there, everything is built by compression, without screws or glue, giving life to shelves and modular structures that preserve the integrity of the books and invite you to play with space. “Cartoon” is not just a mounting system: it’s a way to give a second life to objects charged with memory, transforming them into living matter for new visual narratives.
But Derrey’s approach goes beyond the idea of recycling. In the Tension series, for example, the research focuses on force and balance. A side table is born from the interaction between cardboard tubes and aluminum profiles, compressed by straps that hold the structure together. It’s an exercise in physics applied to design, where pressure becomes stability and constraint becomes an aesthetic gesture. Here too, every component is reusable, detachable, and designed to last without fixing itself into a definitive form.
The same spirit of experimentation returns in smaller objects, like the concrete ashtray, where the layer lines typical of 3D printing become ornamental texture, or in Shard, a pair of sculptural glasses printed in PLA that explores forms impossible to achieve with traditional techniques. Each piece seems to belong to a broader discourse on the relationship between process and form, between matter and the digital gesture.
As early as Floor, his 2021 project, Derrey showed an interest in reinterpreting everyday space. A simple structure turned a rug into a seat, offering two different inclinations and suggesting a more informal, fluid way of living. An idea that seems to descend directly from skate culture, where objects are always finding new functions.
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In his most recent collections, such as the Rolls Edition, Derrey carries forward the same modular and circular logic, building seats and side tables with reclaimed materials assembled without screws, glues, or stitches. The result is a design that manages to be technical and poetic at the same time: minimal in form yet full of meaning.
Through his work, Stanislas Derrey sketches a future of design that does not necessarily pass through technology for its own sake, but through the ability to rethink what already exists — materials, objects, gestures — and make them converse in new, sustainable, and surprisingly human ways.
