Modern furniture design has been quietly shifting priorities. Smaller homes and more deliberate interiors have created real demand for pieces that do more without taking up more space or sacrificing how they look. Stools and side tables are easy targets for this kind of dual-purpose thinking, but most of them still feel like a workaround, a compromise dressed up as a solution, rather than a genuinely well-considered object.
The Ishi stool from Japanese studio Mililab isn’t that kind of compromise. It came out of a separate project entirely, one that had nothing to do with stools, and it ended up as something that’s equal parts furniture object and quiet design statement. That accidental origin is actually central to understanding why it looks the way it does, and why it works as well as it does.
Designer: Mililab
The story starts with the studio’s own Maru dining table. While developing it, founders Livert Lim and Mengfei Wu kept drifting back to the legs, almost despite themselves. Those legs tapered inward along one unbroken curve, giving them a presence that had little to do with the tabletop above. As Mililab described it: “A shape that didn’t need the table above it.” So they separated it and let it stand alone.
Working with collaborator Djordje Cebic, they developed Ishi into a form that’s both monolithic and unexpectedly soft, something like a river-worn pebble given volume. From across the room, it appears impossibly thin; up close and under your hand, it’s substantial. That tension between visual lightness and physical solidity isn’t accidental. It’s the result of curves computed in Tokyo and then realized by hand in the workshop.
The material process behind that solidity gets genuinely obsessive. The stool is made from North American white oak, selected for grain consistency, kiln-dried, hand-shaped, then kiln-dried again, because the glue introduced during assembly brings moisture back into the wood. Most workshops skip that second drying. Mililab doesn’t. It’s sealed immediately after, locking in a 10% moisture content, the exact point at which white oak is most dimensionally stable.
The cushion on top, available in Kvadrat Savanna, Dedar fabric, or Italian leather, looks fully integrated with the oak base. It isn’t, of course, which is the point. Pull it off, flip it over, and the flat underside becomes a surface, turning the stool into a side table. It works just as well beside a sofa at home as it does in a hotel lobby or a studio apartment. At 430mm, the height was chosen deliberately. It’s low enough to pair with a lounge chair, yet also tall enough to sit beside a dining table or vanity desk.
There’s something refreshing about a piece of furniture that arrived this way, not from a brief or a market gap, but from genuine distraction. Lim and Wu were supposed to be designing a dining table and kept staring at the legs instead. It’s not a narrative most furniture studios would lead with, but it does explain why the Ishi stool feels like something they simply couldn’t help making.
The post Mililab Made a Dining Table, Got Distracted, and Made a Better Stool first appeared on Yanko Design.