Hasta La Ideas

Our homes have plenty of horizontal surfaces, whether desks or dining/coffee/end tables, on which to rest our objects. Our sofas, meanwhile, are meant to rest our asses on. But Dutch design label Spell uses wood to create a novel object-supporting platform that can straddle both horizontal surfaces and the curvature of a sofa armrest.

The Embrace Interaction Platform, as it’s unwieldily called, is a wooden tray with a neat trick. Hinged slats mean it can either lay flat or be draped over a curve; assuming your sofa’s armrests aren’t too much of a parabola, this provides a handy way to create an instant surface.

A slot running around the perimeter of the centermost portion can support a tablet, though it seems that with the angle adjustment, you’ll have to live with what you get.

The slot also does double duty as cable management, though it’s not clear how the cable’s exit towards the power source is handled.

I’m not sure how stable it is when arched and standing on its “feet,” but if they’ve worked that out, it appears you could also use the tray to elevate a tablet on a desk surface.

This isn’t a mere concept, by the way; Spell sells the Embrace right here for €318. (Their Coroflot page mentions it comes in either walnut or oak, but on the commercial site it appears they’ve jettisoned the oak.)