< img src ="https://www.yankodesign.com/images/design_news/2026/03/flakt-just-redesigned-the-air-purifier-as-furniture/1.jpg"alt="" width="1280" height ="960"/ > If you’ve ever owned an air purifier, you know the drill. You unpack it, it works great, and after that you invest the next three years moving it from corner to corner because no matter where it lands, it looks completely out of place. It hums quietly beside your bookshelf looking slightly medical. It sits in your bedroom like it belongs in a waiting space. The technology is fine. The design? Usually an afterthought.
That’s what makes Fläkt, developed by Laura Chaves at the Savannah College of Art and Style and a winner at the 2025 European Item Style Award, seem like such a breath of fresh air (pun quite meant). It approaches air filtration not as an appliance issue to fix, but as a home issue, which difference completely alters the result.
Designer: Laura Chaves
The first thing you notice is that it doesn’t appear like an air purifier at all. It looks like a thought about furniture piece. The structure sits on a handcrafted walnut raised stand, the example you ‘d see cradling a ceramic vessel in a curated Scandinavian living room. The body is encased in geopolymer concrete, a light-weight, sustainable alternative to standard concrete, which gives it that raw, tactile quality that’s quite in the house in modern interiors. And set down at the top is a smooth, clear sandblasted glass vase holding a live air-purifying plant. It’s an elegant full-circle idea: the machine that cleans your air is actually growing something that cleans your air.
That layering of idea and material is the type of design thinking that should have real attention. Chaves didn’t just dress up a practical product and call it a day. The form, the products, and the purpose are all drawing in the exact same direction, and you can feel that intentionality in every part of the things. Geopolymer concrete rather of plastic. Walnut rather of injection-molded legs. A glass vase that holds a living component instead of a decorative panel that hides the mechanics.
The buddy app extends that same level of consideration into how you really utilize it. Fläkt monitors air quality around the clock and triggers autonomously when it detects pollutants or particle matter, whether that’s pollen, dust, or anything else wandering through your space. The app surface areas this information clearly, tracking air quality throughout the day in tidy, legible charts, with prompt notifications for filter modifications. It’s the kind of transparency that a lot of wise home products promise and rarely provide with this much clarity. You’re not simply handed a number and delegated guess what it suggests. You’re offered context, and that matters.
My honest take is that the air cleanser classification has been drifting on function alone for too long. We accept unsightly hardware in our homes because we’ve been told utility and beauty are separate issues, that you choose one or the other. Fläkt pushes back against that reasoning, and it does so without feeling precious or attempting too hard. The design is grounded and warm, not performative. It belongs in a genuine room with genuine furniture and real life occurring around it.
The decision to incorporate a live plant isn’t simply a styling option, either. It’s a statement about how style can reconnect us to something organic in areas significantly filled with screens and artificial products. A peaceful confidence runs through that idea, and it makes Fläkt feel less like a tech item and more like a living object.
Whether or not Fläkt makes it to full production, it currently does something useful: it raises the bar for what air cleansers are enabled to be. For a design that came out of a trainee project, that’s not a little thing. It’s the kind of work that tends to appear in mood boards before it shows up in shops, which’s typically a respectable indication.
< img src="https://www.yankodesign.com/images/design_news/2026/03/flakt-just-redesigned-the-air-purifier-as-furniture/3.jpg" alt ="" width="1280" height="960"/ > < img src ="// www.w3.org/2000/svg%22%20viewBox=%220%200%201280%20960%22%3E%3C/svg%3E" data-src="https://www.yankodesign.com/images/design_news/2026/03/flakt-just-redesigned-the-air-purifier-as-furniture/3.jpg" alt ="" width="1280" height="960"/ >