Studio Hagen Hall's First Furniture Piece Tops Dezeen's October Roundup

A coffee table that needs no screws, bolts or glue of any kind — just two legs and a weighty glass top — marks the first furniture piece ever made by London architecture office Studio Hagen Hall. It leads Dezeen's monthly roundup of design pieces spotted by the site's Jane Englefield over the last month.

Louis Hagen Hall designed the asymmetric piece, called SHH-001, for Pine Heath, a modernist Hampstead renovation the studio completed earlier. A corner sofa there left awkward negative space that called for a bespoke table. Cherry veneer legs pair with recyclable brown smoked glass, and the made-to-order piece draws on the design philosophy of modernist American architect John Lautner.

What does a vase look like when it stops being a container?

For Austrian, Netherlands-based designer Flora Lechner, the answer is a scaffolding of aluminium clips held together by stainless steel bolts. Stems slot straight into the clips, which rest on a base that can be filled with water.

"Exo 01 approaches the vase more as a support structure than as a container," explained Lechner. "Inspired by braces used to hold and align parts of the body, the work applies this principle to flowers."

London's Max Radford Gallery first noticed Lechner for her alternative aluminium chandeliers that look like ornate robots.

Cast glass and volcanic forms at Carpenter's Workshop Gallery

Dutch architect and designer Anne Holtrop, known for rough-hewn furniture that conjures volcanic craters and mountainous landscapes, is showing his Low-relief collection of cast glass tables in London. The tables mark his inaugural exhibition with Carpenter's Workshop Gallery. Their unrefined legs were informed by stone reliefs Holtrop visited in Aswan, Egypt.

A first cabinet from Helsinki

Helsinki designer Didi Ng Wing Yin debuted Pleats Cabinet No 1 at Paris's Spazio Nobile Gallery last week. Ng is known for distinctively pleated wooden furniture made from locally sourced Finnish timber. The cabinet mixes fir and pine, finished with tung oil, and its delicately pleated door uses his combined splitting, brushing and carving technique.

"I wanted to explore the dynamic contrast between form and texture," Ng told Dezeen.

"The chunky pedestal base is built from straightforward architectural beams that retain their natural knots and raw characteristics, providing a heavy, structural anchor for the light, organic silhouette of the pleated cabinet door," he added.

Brass slabs and two-week balloons at PAD London

October's design calendar also delivered PAD London, the annual collectible fair in Mayfair's Berkley Square. Mexico-based Manu Bañó showed a duo of patinated brass chairs there, formed from stacked, sculptural slabs of metal. The chairs continue his existing brass and stainless steel furniture and appeared as part of the Objects with Narratives exhibition.

South Korean designer Seungjin Yang brought his most recent balloon-like creations to the same fair: a sofa, two armchairs and two stools. Yang coats real balloons in colourful epoxy resin, painstakingly building their strength. Each piece takes around two weeks of delicate testing to complete. The finished objects look fragile, but they're solid enough to sit on.

With an architect turning furniture designer, a vase recast as medical-style bracing and balloons hardened into seating, October's picks point to a collectible design scene increasingly borrowing logic from architecture, medicine and toys alike.