Floating on air, flickering with lightning, providing a pillowy soft surface or gently raining water down on plants, these cloud-shaped home accents and architectural designs are downright heavenly. A bluetooth speaker magically levitates above its base, a lamp provides motion-activated thunderstorm shows, a concrete display base makes toilet paper commercials literal in their comparisons and a house in Australia takes on a highly unusual silhouette.

Levitating Cloud Speaker by Richard Clarkson Studio + Crealev

A cumulus cloud hovers over a wooden base, floating up to two inches above the surface, bobbing back and forth. That cloud is actually a speaker, and it levitates using the power of magnets. ‘Making Weather’ blends Crealev’s magnetic levitation technology with Richard Clarkson’s artificial cloud designs for an eye-catching product that flickers with ‘lightning’ when you play music.

Knitted Cloud Stools by Studio Joon&Jung

Chunky skeins of wool get hand-knitted into soft, cloudily masses made to sit atop wooden stools. Say the designers, Joon+Jung, “Cloud Stool is inspired by the flexibility and softness of the cloudscape. It can be singular or become a group as a human being. It gives the illusion that it’s alive, by using irregularity, flexibility and subtle differences in tone of perception. Conclusively, the form interacts between objects, and people could explore with it.”

Concrete Cloud Toilet Paper Holder

This might just be the most clever display of backup toilet paper ever created, yet it’s so simple. A curving concrete base lets you stack the rolls into a cloud shape, fitting up to 14 rolls for the large size, and it’s also available in a smaller size for space-challenged bathrooms.

Cloud House by McBride Charles Ryan

This modern home addition by McBride Charles Ryan expands the back of an Edwardian house in Victoria, Australia, with a glazed end looking out onto a long, narrow lap pool. “The new living addition faces due south while allowing controlled north sun into the living area and providing effective cross ventilation,” say the architects. “The form of the ‘cloud’ conforms to setback regulations without appearing obviously determined by them. The extrusion creates a dramatic interior language where walls merge seamlessly with the floor and ceiling. While the geometry is playful, the extrusion is essentially a contemporary barrel vault. It is our hope that this cloud has a ‘silver lining.’

Le Nuage by Wout Wessemius

Puffs of ultra-realistic clouds glow as if caught by rays of sunlight, illuminated from within by energy-efficient bulbs and hung from the ceiling. ‘Le Nuage’ by Netherlands-based designer Wout Wessemius is a particularly striking version of the ‘cloud lamp’ phenomenon that swept through the industrial design world over the last few years.

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Floating On Air 14 Cloud Shaped Homes Furnishings Decor Designs

A “universally despised” postmodern public square in Los Angeles is getting a second look this week with the addition of a surreal glittering silver cloud that undulates in the air above the concrete, seemingly floating without any supports. Tethered from a 10-story purple bell tower to a lower corner of the park, the latticework installation is made of thousands of holographic mylar strips that flutter in the breeze. The work is a collaboration between patrick Shearn of Poetic Kinetics and the AA Visiting School of Los Angeles, a week-long design program for art students.

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Due for a makeover in 2019 that will replace much of the concrete with grass and create shade canopies, Pershing Square tends to be empty and quiet despite renewed vitality in other areas of downtown L.A. It’s one of the city’s oldest public spaces, but had its trees and grass ripped out in 1951 so a parking garage could be installed beneath it.

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Poetic Kinetics is known for creating many of the massive, colorful creations that appear at Burning Man each year. Sharon says he was inspired by nature and “the feeling that we are only aware on a very surface level of what is really going on around us. We feel the currents of air on our skin but do not see the larger movements.”

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The Los Angeles Times captured 360-degree views of the installation, which billows like a school of fish when it catches the wind just right. Measuring 15,000 square feet, ‘Liquid Shard’ will remain in place through August 11th, so stop by and experience it in person if you can.

Pulsing with light and life, this incredible art installation provides Covent Garden, a glass-topped marketplace, with a kind of artificial interior skyscape. Created for the London Design Festival, you can watch a time-lapse video of its construction below.

The ‘Invasions’ of Charles Pétillon are well known for popping up in cramped spaces, photographed, then removed, but this project is scaled far larger than his conventional pieces, is much more public and is also his first work outside of France.

Over 100 feet long, this amorphous cloud organically weaves its way through a realm of historical brick and metal detail, a shockingly light, bright and fragile intrusion into a sharp-cornered combination of architecture and engineering.

“The balloon invasions I create are metaphors”, explains Charles Pétillon. “their goal is to change the way in which we see the things we live alongside each day without really noticing them. with ‘heartbeat’ I want to represent the market building as the beating heart of this area – connecting its past with the present day to allow visitors to re-examine its role at the heart of london’s life.”

Home to the tallest building in the world, Dubai is a city rich in skyscrapers that seem almost otherworldly when seen piercing through seasonal layers of urban fog.

Photographer Daniel Cheong resides in this surreal desert city and has taken to capturing images of it from above, particularly during times when the weather is transitioning from warm to cool and producing the effects seen in these shots.

In some cases the viewer can see glimpses of the streets, buildings and marina below, but in others the entire built landscape appears perched on a layer of clouds.

While his photographs do represent reality, they also employ digital blending techniques that combine multiple exposures to make them seem almost more real than reality (but without the stretched effects sometimes seen in overly-processed HDR).

In doing so, he emphasizes “this slight element of the surreal, or hyper-reality often found in painting.” A world traveler, Cheong was “born in Mauritius, originally of Chinese descent, and French by nationality.” Of his picture-taking prowess, he writes: “I’ve always loved photography, but only became serious about it when I bought my first DSLR in Singapore, back in 2006.”

“I then aimed to perfect the technique of Digital Blending, which consists of manually blending multiple bracketed exposures in order to obtain the maximum dynamic range, while trying to keep a very natural look and avoiding the common mistake of many ‘overcooked’ HDR images. This slight element of the surreal, or hyper reality often found in painting is what I am trying to achieve”

A complex spanning in seemingly all directions, this sky-oriented, cloud-shaped, forward-thinking design has just won the Shenzhen Super City Competition in China. It represents a critical way of rethinking (and reshaping) what it means to build vertically in urban environments, and creating horizontal connections between those upward structures.

Dubbed Cloud Citizen, this winning proposal was a collaboration Urban Future Organization and CR-Design in conjunction with a team from Chalmers Technical University.

The design is aimed at tackling the Shenzhen Bay, an area adjacent to Hong Kong facing long-standing and still-growing issues of urban density and pollution. Of course, the visually-striking aspects also help form an iconic identity from this mega-structure as well.

The idea involves suspending residential, commercial and institutional nodes of activity in the air, interspersing homes with cultural facilities and leisure centers and allowing small pieces to add up to a larger whole. Instead of a straight vertical skyscraper, the organic form branches out with three-dimensional complexity to create interconnections in the sky.

Aside from its mesmerizing aesthetics, the project boasts a slew of sustainable strategies: “All 170 hectares of the 680 meter-tall super city work in cooperation with nature to make that future a reality; lush gardens act as ‘green lungs’ connecting each of Cloud Citizen’s public spaces; built-in mechanisms harvest rainwater, and power the city with solar, wind, and algae-based energy, special sections of the city will store carbon and filter particles from the air, while housing sanctuaries for plant life; localized food production modules and housing will cut down on carbon emissions from transportation. These diverse elements work together to create a harmonious vision of the cities of the future.”