This website uses cookies to improve your experience navigating our site. By continuing to browse, you are agreeing to our use of cookies.
OK, I understand
Australian houses, from architectural masterpieces to suburban family homes, Victorian terraces, mid-century marvels, coastal shacks, city apartments, and everything in between.
Award-winning Australian architecture, inspiring homes, and interviews with Australia’s top architects.
Award-winning Australian interior design, inspiring homes, and interviews with Australia’s top designers.
In depth features on Australia’s most beautiful gardens and landscape design.
Studio visits with Australia’s most talented creatives, from artists to architects, ceramicists to stylists, furniture makers to lighting designers.
Studio visits with Australia’s top artists, and unmissable art exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and beyond.
Weekly recipes and meal ideas from our favourite cooks, authors and foodies.
Unique travel destinations, design-led accomodation and day trip ideas in Australia and New Zealand.
Australian houses, from architectural masterpieces to suburban family homes, Victorian terraces, mid-century marvels, coastal shacks, city apartments, and everything in between.
Award-winning Australian architecture, inspiring homes, and interviews with Australia’s top architects.
Award-winning Australian interior design, inspiring homes, and interviews with Australia’s top designers.
In depth features on Australia’s most beautiful gardens and landscape design.
Studio visits with Australia’s most talented creatives, from artists to architects, ceramicists to stylists, furniture makers to lighting designers.
Studio visits with Australia’s top artists, and unmissable art exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and beyond.
Weekly recipes and meal ideas from our favourite cooks, authors and foodies.
Unique travel destinations, design-led accomodation and day trip ideas in Australia and New Zealand.
Today's guest blog sees Sarah and Liane bring us more amazing Supercycling, this time with a mix of ornamental and structural ways to re-purpose paper. Can't wait to drag the Encyclopedia Britannica out of the garage! - Jenny x
This is from Simryn Gill’s Pearls series. The artist takes a favourite book from a special person and rolls it into beads for them. What a wonderful and meaningful way to treasure your old books. This beautiful image is titled Pearls, Sydney, 2003
You can read more about the necklaces in the Pearls book here
The architecture library at Delft University of Technology features a spectacular front desk built out of recycled books. Image © Ellen Forsyth. More info here and here
These recycled paper bowls by Cuiora are made from paper bags that originally carried rice in Japan.
This basket made from shredded paper by Tamara Burlando was recently shown at The PaperMill Gallery. Burlando is South American by birth but trained in the Central Australian desert with the incredible weavers there. She weaves newspaper into her baskets, dating them and making them undeniably current.
If you need a shredded desk to put your shredded basket on, Studio Jens Praet has made the desk for you. The design studio were horrified by the huge amounts of wastepaper produced in offices and endeavored to find another use for it. They shredded and transformed unuseful documents and leftover magazines into valuable and useful objects. The waste paper waste returns as functional furniture, that is as strong as the wood it once came from. This table is made from 26kg of leftover magazines, and is the biggest item from the Shredded Collection ever made!
If you’d like a chair to go with your table, this shredded paper chair is by Charles Kaisin.
If you’d like to do something with all your wastepaper, get your old newspapers and spin them into some paper yarn. Learn how to here.
Of course, you could wear Movana Chen’s chic outfit here is made from shredded newspapers, and was shown in the ‘Fashion Ethics Good Wear’ exhibition at the Museum of Modern art in Korea.
You’ll need somewhere to put all your supercycled paper goodness. This office in Paris by French designer Mathieu Lehanneur for advertising agency JWT features caves made from pulped paper and plants that play music. “It has literally sucked up and recycled the available paper in the agency, an archaic and useless support that JWT France eventually envisages totally eliminating.’
More pulped goodness from Pulp 2.0. Their post consumer vessels and furniture are made from paper waste using discarded vessels as positive image moulds. The collection is the result of a thorough research on new applications for paper waste by adding water resistant properties. A mixture of shredded newspaper, glue and water is applied in several layers on the surface, dried, and finally cut into two removing it from the mould. The pieces are glued back together before applying the last layers of the PULP mixture.
Artist Yuken Teruya makes incredible things from waste paper, including these sculptural landscapes called Corner Forest from paper rolls.
The Design Files acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which we work, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. We pay our respects to Elders past and present.
First Nations artists, designers, makers, and creative business owners are encouraged to submit their projects for coverage on The Design Files. Please email bea@thedesignfiles.net
The Design Files’ original content and photos are copyright protected. Please email us before reposting our content on other publications, personal websites, or Instagram. Feel free to share our images on Pinterest using the credit ‘via thedesignfiles.net’. Thank you!