IN BY ON is a minimalist furniture and object series designed by Seoul-based studio Studio Norré. The series takes its name from three prepositions, and that grammatical starting point reveals the conceptual rigor underneath. Rather than designing objects first and considering their relationships afterward, Studio Norré began with the spatial conditions themselves, letting a single folded geometry generate the conditions under which small rituals of placement might unfold. The result collapses the usual hierarchy between furniture and accessory, treating surfaces, edges, and voids as equal participants in a choreography of daily use.
The folded geometry operates as a kind of shared grammar across the three pieces. A plane bends, creates a slope, arrives at an edge, then folds again to produce an interior condition. This logic of continuous folding recalls the structural thinking of Japanese origami furniture experiments from the 1960s and the later paper-fold studies of Issey Miyake’s collaborators, though Studio Norré is working in harder materials and with a more reductive hand. The fold is not decorative here. It is the mechanism that produces the three prepositional states: a flat stretch becomes “on,” a leaning angle becomes “by,” an enclosed cavity becomes “in.”
The cherry wood table anchors the series as a topographic field rather than a conventional surface. Its slopes and edges refuse the flatness that tables typically demand of the objects placed upon them, introducing instead a range of resting conditions. An item can perch, lean against a rise, or settle into a lower plane. This approach echoes the landscape-as-furniture thinking of designers like Martino Gamper or the terrain-like tables of Muller Van Severen, where the horizontal surface becomes a site of negotiation rather than passive support.
Object 01 extends the folded logic into aluminium, a material whose thinness allows the geometry to remain crisp and dimensionally honest. Its reversibility, functioning as both dish and inverted containment form, mirrors the dual spatial conditions the series explores. The object holds when oriented one way and sits when flipped, participating in either the “in” or “on” condition depending on the user’s gesture. Aluminium’s cool neutrality also provides a material counterpoint to the warmth of cherry, reinforcing the sense that each piece contributes a distinct register to the overall system.
Object 02 introduces gold mirror-polished stainless steel, a finish that reads as almost liquid at this scale. As an incense holder, its compactness allows it to slot into the “in” or “by” conditions established by the table, and its reflective surface pulls in fragments of the surrounding environment, briefly dissolving the boundary between object and context. The choice of a ceremonial function for the most visually precious material feels considered, positioning the piece within a longer Korean and East Asian tradition of treating ritual objects as small sculptures.
