Art of the Seat: 15 Stunning Sculptural Chair Designs

Another supervillain yahtzee! This black skull armchair was the one prop missing from my master plan to raise an army of babies and eliminate all cats and bike lanes from my township! The only downside is that it does not appear to swivel, which could pose a problem when it's time to face Lance Armstrong and the Calicos, and I strain my neck trying to whip around for the big reveal of my eeeevil visage.

When you're a genie, or Cypriot designer Stelios Mousarris, you don't just know how to make magic carpets fly, you know how to bend and fold them into a creative and elegant seating option to use when you're not in the air. Mousarris designed the Carpet Chair in collaboration with artist Jan Blythe, and it's molded from an actual Persian carpet. Buyers have a choice of pattern and style, which Mousarris and Blythe need a few months to weave by hand and then finesse into the floating illusion you see here.

MANET says, "Sitting can be playful," which is all the reason I need to buy one of their order-o'-fries-looking Easy Chairs. To prove to my wife that I'm not just lounging around on my ass, I'm being playful.

Though speaking of ass and playful, how playful are those protruding French fries going to be with my ass when I do a butt flop on the MANET? They're soft and give way easily, right?

Someone should hire Self-Regenerative Wax Lamp and Antler Chair creator, Merve Kahraman, to design the next Olympics Opening Ceremonies or, like, my living room. Her brain is a giant KFC bucket of ideas. All of them at least as good as the Colonel's chicken.

The anthropomorphic piece of seating, obviously centerpieced by its sick set of antlers rising from behind to frame chair occupants' heads, also buckifies itself with carved hoof legs, a textured paint finish that mimics deer fur, and specially crafted patterned leather.

Though I am not a tennis fan, given that the opening line of Animi Causa's product copy for their balls lounger is, "The Feel Deluxe is made of 120 soft and extremely pleasant balls," I am very happy that it's the tennis kind of balls that they look like. Because this infinitely malleable piece of furniture seems as if it may be the most comfortable place on earth to lay my weary head, outside of Halle Berry's lap, and I would hate for unsavory anatomical associations to keep me from it.

Dutch designer Jolan van der Wiel not only created these Fraggle-Rock-meets-Super-Mario-Brothers-meets-Gotham-City hybrids, he also created the simple wood-framed machine used to forge them. Summoning the forces of gravity and magnets, van der Wiel places a secret sauce of liquid plastic compounds and iron fillings into a magnet-lined bowl, and then watches as 15 additional magnets attract the mixture, drawing it upward, and allowing nature to take shape.

Resultant stools are exact replicas of the magnetic pull. They're van der Wiel's way of giving an otherwise invisible field opacity, structure, tangible beauty, and an organic birth. Kind of like when the rest of us use witchcraft to manifest the ghosts haunting our furnace rooms.

When it comes to Maximo Riera's Animal Chairs, be it the octopus or the elephant, the walrus in matte black or the bullfrog in electric green, the word "showstopper" is an understatement. These pieces' detail and biological accuracy are absolutely breathtaking, and I bet if the real version of any one of these animals saw its Riera Chair counterpart, it would hump it immediately.

Turn yourself into a life-size, real-life Weeble with the Restless Rocking Chair, a whimsical piece of kinetic furniture from Czech designer Karel Matejka. Though termed a "rocking chair" for simplicity, the Restless armchair rocks like a roly-poly, in all directions, plus spins 'round and 'round on its axis, rather than sticking to a simple forward-back sway like a typical rocker.

The Phantom Chair is made of a single giant sheet of carbon fiber, molded into a shell that looks like it's draped over a fine chaise underneath. Like something my Aunt Jan bought at Ashley Furniture, but is so paranoid someone will scratch, soil, or spill on that she keeps it all covered up with a grungy old blanket, thereby defeating the purpose of buying a new chair to begin with.

Though the luxe, leathery sheen of the Phantom's carbon fiber "cover" is obviously way nicer than a grungy old blanket...and probably every piece of furniture in my Aunt Jan's house combined.