Born in Austria and based in Paris, furniture designer Robert Stadler creates surrealistic, often strangely proportioned pieces. A quilted mass of bright colored material makes up a living room set—sofa, chairs, coffee table—and the biomorphic, plasma-like bulges appear as through they’re slowly melting. A table, made of stacked biomorphic disks, looks at first arbitrarily piled, but in fact it’s ergonomically designed and created to cast particular shadows. “I enjoy revealing the strange sides to an object and making people love them,” Stadler says. “We easily reject the bizarre as it seems established that functional objects should be simple, self-explanatory, attractive, etc. So I try to add a different dimension to my works, but without neglecting these rational parameters.”