Furniture rarely makes me stop scrolling. Most of what cycles through my feed either looks too clinical to feel livable or too trendy to last past next season. But when I came across Macarons, a modular furniture system by Taiwanese designers HanYi Huang and Fong-Yi Liou, I actually paused. Not because it was trying too hard, but because it wasn’t.
The name gives it away, and that’s the point. Macarons draws its visual language directly from the French confection, right down to the rounded forms, the layered silhouette, and that quietly playful quality that makes you smile before you even understand why. The design came from 03 Design Ltd. in Taiwan and was created for longtime furniture manufacturer Shiang Ye Industrial Co. It picked up a double win at the 2025 European Product Design Award, taking home recognition in both Home Furniture and Eco Design, which tells you this isn’t just a pretty concept piece.
Designers: HanYi Huang
What actually makes Macarons interesting as a furniture system is the modularity. You get a configurable set of stools, chairs, and side tables built around a simple logic: swap the legs, change the seat, add on what you need. The components connect through a rotational seat mechanism that makes assembly genuinely easy and, more importantly, makes repair possible. That second part tends to get glossed over in product launches, but it matters a lot. A piece of furniture you can actually fix is one you’ll keep for a decade. That’s the quiet kind of sustainability nobody puts in the headline.
The structural engineering behind the legs is where things get clever. Huang and Liou designed an off-centered, cloverleaf knot leg structure that improves both strength and comfort simultaneously. That’s a harder problem to solve than it sounds. Most furniture designers pick one or the other and call it a day. The fact that the leg geometry does both while also contributing to the visual identity of the product is the kind of decision that separates designers who think holistically from those who think in silos.
The material choice is equally deliberate. The entire system is made from post-consumer recycled polypropylene, which cuts down on waste and makes the pieces lighter to ship. Shipping weight is one of those sustainability factors that rarely gets talked about in design discourse, but it compounds fast. Lighter furniture means lower emissions per unit moved, and when you’re thinking about a modular system that’s meant to scale, that math matters.
I’ll be upfront about what I find genuinely compelling here: this isn’t sustainability as aesthetic, which is a trend I find exhausting. You know the type, raw edges, reclaimed wood, a beige palette that wants you to feel virtuous for just looking at it. Macarons doesn’t do that. It leans into color, playfulness, and modularity first, and builds the sustainability into the structure and material rather than the surface. That’s the right order of operations.
HanYi Huang brings a sharp design background to this. Her postgraduate work in Italy earned her a Red Dot Design award, and she’s been leading the design team at Shiang Ye as Creative Director, steering a traditional B2B furniture manufacturer toward work that competes internationally. That kind of trajectory, from a classic manufacturing context to award-winning modular systems with a global footprint, is worth paying attention to.
What Macarons ultimately argues is that modular, repairable, and recyclable furniture doesn’t have to feel like a compromise or a lecture. It can feel light, joyful, and considered. It can look like something you’d actually want in your home rather than something you bought to feel better about your carbon footprint. That’s a harder balance to strike than most people realize, and Huang and Liou struck it. Design that makes you feel good and does good at the same time is still the rarest kind. Macarons comes close.
