Inahono Furniture designer Nobutsuna Honami created 'Chois,' a small family of 3D-printed joints that turn ordinary wooden dowels into furniture, featuring palm-sized connectors that set angles and structural logic. The product is just the engineered joint; users supply dowels cut to length to make a three-legged side table, valet stand, or hanging rack.
The Chois set limits manufacturing to the printed piece, leaving material, finish, and scale to the builder. Each connector slots standard dowels and provides precision and stability, so the dowel only needs a rough cut. Damaged legs can be replaced without discarding the connector.
For consumers, this makes custom, modular furniture more accessible by shifting complexity into a single printed component. Chois reduces waste and shipping bulk because only tiny parts are produced, and it reframes furniture as a user-led, adaptable object.
Image Credit: Nobutsuna Honami
What Makes This Trend Stand Out
- Connector-based Furniture
- Small engineered joints concentrate the complex geometry of furniture into compact components, creating room for customizable products that rely on locally sourced or user-supplied materials.
- Repairable Modular Design
- Replaceable parts and reusable connectors extend product lifecycles, opening new value in furniture systems that reduce waste while supporting changing household needs.
- Distributed 3d-printed Hardware
- Compact printable components shift production away from bulky finished goods, enabling lighter logistics models and more flexible customization across home furnishings.
Sectors Adopting This
- Furniture
- Modular joint systems introduce a more adaptable category of home goods where consumers define scale, finish, and configuration without full-scale manufacturing complexity.
- 3D Printing
- Precision-printed connectors demonstrate how additive manufacturing can specialize in high-value functional parts rather than complete products, supporting distributed production networks.
- Home Improvement
- User-assembled furniture kits blur the line between decor and DIY, creating opportunities for accessible customization tools, replacement parts, and material-efficient home projects.
