As you may have noticed, there’s no shortage of home designs that incorporate unlikely upcycled objects … wine racks made of skis, speakers made from Dorito bags, lamps crafted from audiocassette tapes, and the list goes on and on. It's a pretty hit or miss affair, populated by concepts that are ingenious but too over-the-top to fly in most homes or more restrained items that motivate admirers to either click “buy” or embark on their own similar DIY design project.
The one-of-a-kind home designs — accessories, lighting, furniture — created by the trio of young designers/salvagers at Israeli sustainable design studio Mesila fall into the latter camp. You might be inclined to think that a lamp constructed from salvaged clothespins (pictured above) would look silly but in the hands of Shlomit Levy, Avital Levy, and Ifat Zvirin it’s quite elegant.
Here’s how the trio describe their approach to sustainable design:
We espouse the eco-design strategy, which minimizes the environmental footprint of the product by using a multitude of considerations such as a careful selection of materials, improving production processes and taking into account the product’s afterlife. In other words, instead of producing an infinite number of objects, we suggest to give objects an infinite life.


