Tag wood

Without much fanfare, OnePlus revealed the design that would mark its newest flagship, the OnePlus 12. While that two-digit number proves it’s no longer a young upstart, the brand is famed for outside-the-box thinking when it comes to design and materials. That’s not to say it always comes out with guns blazing, and zeal sometimes has to be tempered with practicality. Take for example the upcoming OnePlus 12 which is now officially confirmed to be using pretty much the exact same design as its predecessor. While that might not make for a sensational launch, it does give a sense of familiarity and stability. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any sign of an earlier wooden grain shell, which could probably dampen a few excited expectations.

Designer: OnePlus

At this point, it might be difficult to pinpoint which company really started this camera design trend, but OnePlus has been doing some rather interesting experiments in the past years. In order to make the usual camera bump a little more interesting visually, the OnePlus 10 last year adopted a rather unique style where the camera’s raised bump actually continued and curved off to the side. This year’s OnePlus 11 mixed that up with the circular camera island design that made the phone look like it was wearing a monocle or an eyepatch.

The OnePlus 12 uses this exact same design with one small but important change. There are four sensors now, though one is most likely an RGB or 3D Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensor, so the flash had to move out of the enclosure, giving the camera a more symmetric appearance. Other than that, there are no big visible changes, which means that OnePlus is able to preserve its brand identity for one more generation. Admittedly, the design doesn’t appeal to everyone, but it’s hard to deny that it’s a distinctive one.

What OnePlus has officially revealed so far, however, doesn’t yet include the earlier leaked “wood grain shell,” which could either be a new variant or an official protective case. Instead, the OnePlus 12 will come in three colors with subtly different textures despite all being made from glass. White is compared to silk, black is likened to ceramic, while the green variant seems to be trying to pull off another marble-like aesthetic.

OnePlus hasn’t yet completely spilled all the beans regarding its upcoming flagship, so it’s a little too early to say if that’s all there is to it. Of course, in terms of hardware, it will have the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor to lead the way, and its photography roster is expected to include a 50MP main camera and a 64MP telephoto shooter with 3x optical zoom. The OnePlus 12 is scheduled to be officially announced in China next week, but a global date is expected on December 15.

Although it seems to have become a bit quieter and more business-minded of late, OnePlus was a brand that boasted bucking trends both in the way it designed phones and how it conducted its business. The first OnePlus phone, for example, sported a removable back cover and cover designs that included uncommon materials like sandstone and wood. More recent OnePlus designs have become less daring and more conventional, though the company does offer unique variations or accessories from time to time. Such a time might be coming later this year with the new OnePlus 12, which might don a wooden back yet again, whether as an integrated rear panel or an aftermarket accessory.

Designer: OnePlus (via Digital Chat Station)

The OnePlus One was quite the rebellious teen when it launched back in 2014. It carried flagship specs but dangled a price tag that sounded too good to be true. It brought back removable batteries and back covers that you could swap to your heart’s delight. The latter was an important detail that appealed to a style-conscious market, a market that tends to make things go viral on the Internet, which is probably what helped make OnePlus an overnight sensation. Those days are long gone, but the company might be making a throwback soon, depending on how you interpret this latest leak.

According to a reliable tipster, the OnePlus 12 will feature a “classic wood grain shell,” a phrase taken from an auto-translation of the original text. The image below shows proof of that, complete with all the unevenness and imperfections that give wood its natural beauty. Naturally, with only one part of the phone’s back shown, the revelation sparks plenty of discussions and speculations on what that “shell” really means.

On the one hand, it could be a completely new variant that uses wood or “faux wood” as the material for the OnePlus 12’s back panel. This is a possibility if you consider that OnePlus no longer makes its back covers removable, just like every other smartphone in the market today. On the other hand, it could simply be a special edition of protective cases, though it would seem to be extra slim if that were the case (no pun intended).

What makes the guessing game a bit more complicated is that OnePlus has actually done all of those over the course of its history. The OnePlus One, for example, was notable for its SwitchStyle covers that included bamboo, walnut, and sandstone textures. More recently, it launched a limited “Marble Odyssey” edition of the OnePlus 11 5G that employed 3D microcrystalline rocks to achieve the unique look and feel of marble. Suffice it to say, OnePlus is at least still keen on pushing the boundaries of materials, textures, and designs that give its smartphones more personality than your average handset.

With its simple form factor and dual-shade wood construction, Oakywood’s MagSafe iPhone Stand/Charger has an aesthetic quality similar to the kinds found in Japanese and Scandinavian homes. Fondly known as ‘Japandi’ (an obvious portmanteau of the two words), the design style is characterized by cleanliness and minimalism that eschews materialism and clutter. With its Japandi-inspired style, Oakywood’s MagSafe iPhone Stand adds a touch of rustic beauty to your table, with a design that looks sophisticated but feels familiar thanks to the use of natural materials like Oak and Walnut wood.

Designer: Oakywood

The stand’s two-part design features a powder-coated aluminum base with a wooden ‘tray’ on top. The hefty aluminum base gives the stand its stable design (while also allowing it to function as a paperweight of sorts) while customers have a choice between a light oakwood or dark walnut wood upper, complementing their table setup.

The stand comes with an empty slot that lets you weave your MagSafe charger in. Once put in place, it becomes a nifty magnetic charging dock for your iPhone that you can either use as-is, or detach the MagSafe charger to use as a horizontal charging mat (shown above).

When used in the ‘stand’ mode, it angles your phone at a precise 25°, making it easy to view while also triggering the iPhone’s new Standby Mode – a feature unveiled in the latest iOS 17 update.

If you don’t want to use your Oakywood MagSafe iPhone Stand as a charger, the company sells a magnetic puck that you can slide into the stand, allowing it to work as merely a docking station without the charging facility.

The folks at Oakywood pride themselves in embracing nature as a material and a source for their designs. The use of wood feels antithetical to the metal and glass build of your iPhone, but it brings about a certain warmth to your tabletop, allowing it to become a standard fixture in your workplace. Besides, the entire thing weighs roughly 700 grams (1.5 pounds), making it a rather heavy accessory that doesn’t feel cheap in the slightest.

Oakywood sustainably sources its wood from America and Poland, also pledging to plant one tree for each product sold, thus ensuring a circular economy of sorts that helps reduce the effects of deforestation while turning wood into a renewable resource. You can grab your MagSafe iPhone Stand in three color options – a Light Oak, Dark American Walnut, or a Black Solid Oak that’s the darkest of the lot, matching the powder-coated Aluminum base.

Engineer, automotive enthusiast, woodworking hobbyist, and arguably the dad of the year, Vietnam-based ND Woodworking Art has an entire YouTube page dedicated to documenting his art – building luxury cars for his son out of wood. Sure, some dads stand in line to buy the latest Hot Wheels set… ND Woodworking Art just gathers a ton of lumber and builds the cars to his young child’s scale, creating functional wood automobiles that don’t just feature opening doors and turning wheels – they even have engines, brakes, batteries, and even lights inside them. Given that we’re now nearing the delivery date of Tesla’s most anticipated vehicle, the YouTuber decided to just go and build one for himself. Made entirely out of wood sitting on a welded metal chassis, ND Woodworking Art’s Tesla Cybertruck is one of his biggest builds yet. It’s a tad bit smaller than the original pickup truck (which has seen its fair share of controversies and delays), but comes with all the bells and whistles. You’ve got not one but two sets of opening doors, functional headlights and taillights, positionable rear view mirrors, a rear truck bed that opens, and perhaps the icing on the cake, a functional Tesla Cyberquad in the back, just as Elon had showcased back in November of 2019! As a celebration of Musk’s impact on the tech world, the YouTuber also carved the X (formerly Twitter) logo onto the driver’s door, filling it with epoxy resin and adding lights inside that make the logo glow when the car’s lights are switched on. The video above documents the entire 100-day process, culminating in one of the sweetest finales as the father and son ride together on the road in the Cybertruck and the Cyberquad!

Designer: ND Woodworking Art

While Tesla’s struggled (rather miserably) with meeting Cybertruck delivery timelines, encountering multiple design and manufacturing hiccups along the way, ND Woodworking Art had no such problem. Clearly not his first rodeo, the dad put together a schematic, began building the chassis, and layered it with wood, polish, and lights in just a span of 100 days. Let’s say, the Cybertruck’s angular design made things a lot easier, given that the YouTuber has worked with more challenging organic builds like this incredibly complex miniature Bugatti Centodieci. It’s no bulletproof metal, but then again that’s Tesla’s problem.

What’s more, the truck even features a load-bearing bed at the back that can hold items like a Cyberquad. The tailgate opens up, turning into a telescopic ramp that lets you roll the quad out, just how Elon demonstrated during the Cybertruck’s original reveal.

A look at the telescopic ramp built into the Cybertruck’s tailgate, along with the fully functional quad bike.

The entire process began with a meticulous planning phase, followed by building the car’s chassis out of metal piping welded together. With the original Cybertruck, the space-grade metal body itself doubles as its chassis… but you can’t do that with wooden sheets. The entire car sits on a metal skeleton of sorts, which also houses the car’s electric powertrain.

Once the chassis was ready, ND Woodworking Art began layering it with the wood planks, cutting them, angling them, and nailing/gluing them in place. The truck uses a clever combination of light and dark wood to create some visual drama, while also representing the original car’s metal body and black trims.

Almost every inch of the car gets wood treatment, from the outside to even the inside. The rear gets lined with darker wood as does the car’s interior cockpit and dashboard, featuring light wood chairs and a red wood steering yoke.

The doors open and close just like with any regular car.

The inside features wooden seating that’s carved to resemble cushioned car seats.

This wooden Cybertruck gets a wooden steering yoke to match.

Finally, ND Woodworking Art adds finishing touches to his homemade Tesla. It features a clear sheet on the front as a windshield, along with a functional wiper. The top gets tinted plastic sheets too, giving the car a nice shaded skylight. The front features the classic linear headlight along with left and right indicators, and the rear gets the linear taillight to match. Finally, as an homage to Musk, the YouTuber also embeds an ‘X’ logo into the driver’s door, which lights up on command.

Swedish firm Kolman Boye Architects recently completed a stunning retreat in Lillesand, Norway. The home is a pretty unique one since it utilizes offcut wood that would otherwise have been swiftly discarded. Deemed the Saltviga House, the home was built using 12,000 pieces of oak wood flooring materials. Architects Erik Kolman and Victor Boye who are the founders of Kolman Boye Architects got the idea for the home when they found out that the Danish flooring brand Dinesen had a lot of leftover materials available for use. “In our recent projects and in our teaching and research, we have come across Dinesen materials as both the traditional floors and as a scrap, a leftover, an offcut from the production of made-to-measure floors. Making and thinking with these leftovers from the production gave rise to the notion of making a building of them as a sympathetic way of using and ennobling scrap materials that would otherwise have been used as firewood. Besides being beautiful, the off-cuts are low in embodied carbon, and could offer an alternative to more commonly used and more carbon-intensive materials,” said the firm.

Pros:

• Utilizes leftover offcut wood that would otherwise have been discarded
• The offcuts used are an eco-friendly alternative to more carbon-intensive materials
• The approach allows resources to be used frugally and smartly

Cons:

• The windows on the ground floor are quite expansive, and don’t provide much privacy

Designer: Kolman Boye Architects

The project has been nicknamed “The House of Offcuts”. “It’s about using what’s available, of trying to find beautiful materials without clicking ‘order’ on a computer. When you look at old houses, they would always be built from the best materials available in close proximity,” he told Dezeen. “We wanted to explore how this thinking might look today,” said Boye.  It is situated on a rocky site located on the sea’s edge and is a newly built single-story home spread over five levels, this was done to minimize the impact on the landscape.

Instead of applying the wood randomly, the architect decided upon a single-layer stacking, that builds linear bands of different heights. “We tried stacking in different ways to help us understand how much material we would need, how it would look, and how much work would be involved to cut it to size and treat it,” said Kolman. The variety of color tones that were created as a result of this were quite visually appealing and pleasing. The entire home is made of three volumes, and one of the volume functions as a “wind barrier”, and is a connective element for the other main two buildings.

The interior of the home is spacious and welcoming, and the spaces are equipped with different ceiling heights on the ground floor. The connective volume is lined with long windows that provide expansive views of the sea. The interiors have also been marked with wood, especially Douglas fir cladding.