Most game furniture looks like it belongs in a musty basement smelling of spilled beer and body odor, but high end tables for billiards, foosball, ping pong, shuffleboard and other popular indoor games are made to fit right into luxury environments, sometimes even complete with plated gold details. Some are even works of art in their own right, doubling as sculpture, while others bring games that haven’t changed much in decades a little more firmly into the current century.

Ping Pong FM Interactive Table Tennis Jukebox

This ‘fun musical take’ on table tennis by English designer Mark Wheeler lets you choose a song to set the tempo of your game, and the song only keeps playing as long as you manage to keep the ball in play. Drop it, and your game is over. “Usually music listening experiences are strictly about being as true to the original recording as possible. But why can’t listening to a record be as playful and interactive as a live performance?” says Wheeler.

Luxury Game Tables by Adriano Design

A gold-plated crystalline foosball table is among the ‘luxury’ game options offered by Adriano Design, an Italian-based company operating as both ‘Calma e Gesso’ and ‘TECKELL.’ The Cristallino comes complete with 24-karat-gold plated players – because what else would the owner of a $10 million estate put in their game room? Other offerings include the ‘Filotto’ pool table and the Lungolinea ping pong table, all made in the company’s signature crystal-clear glass. They even produce child-sized ‘Angolo’ foosball table models for kids, which spare no stylish details.

Isamu Noguchi Chess Table

Considered a seminal work of early organic modernism, Isamu Noguchi’s chess table is technically a functional sculpture, presented along with a set of game pieces Noguchi also designed. It debuted at ‘The Imagery of Chess’ in 1944, a show organized by Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst. The table was put into production in 1947, but only a few dozen examples exist. One was auctioned in Los Angeles in 2016, selling for over $100,000.

Woolsey Shuffleboard Table by Sean Woolsey

Long, narrow and sleek, the Woolsey Shuffleboard Table by designer Sean Woolsey features a rift-sawn white oak top finished with epoxy resin and solid black walnut legs, which hide leg levelers. The table comes with 4 white and 4 black pucks, lots of shuffleboard salt and a magnetic wall mount for the pucks when not in use. Prices, unsurprisingly, start at $10K.

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Not Your Dive Bars Pool Table 13 Modern Game Furniture Designs

Furniture giant IKEA is making its new low-cost smart home fixtures voice-controllable can connect with ease to systems including Google Home, Apple HomeKit and Amazon Alexa.

The company has been pushing in the direction of making homes smarter for some time, with furnishings able to wirelessly charge phones, for instance. But with TRADFRI, they are taking the next step, providing low-cost options that can be operated through a variety existing connected-home systems.

“With IKEA Home Smart we challenge everything that is complicated and expensive with the connected home. Making our products work with others on the market takes us one step closer to meet people’s needs, making it easier to interact with your smart home products,” says Björn Block, Business Leader for IKEA Home Smart.

Smart lights, motion sensors, dimmers, door locks, all with additional layers of remote control, are slowly transforming everyday interiors into interactive design spaces. The barrier to entry is also intentionally low: the cost is one factor, but the solutions are also plug-and-play, requiring no complex knowledge or specialized coding. Their latest releases are set to be in stores later this summer or early this fall.

Employing natural processes to illuminate and warm interior spaces, this series of algae-based furnishings combines beautiful glass vessels and organic matter to create lovely yet functional home objects. Each fixture generates light, heat and oxygen using methods similar to those seen in bio-adaptive architectural facades.

Designed by Jacob Douenias and Ethan Frier (photos by Tom Little Photography LLC.), objects in the Spirulina series utilize cyanobacteria, “chosen for its rich green hue, light absorbency, and culinary qualities,” set in alkaline water and housed in shapely glass vessels. Found all over the world, this versatile algae can survive and thrive in all kinds of environments and is already widely used in other forms of biotechnology.

In this commissioned series, a set of spaces show off the various ways these organic home furnishings can be deployed in living and dining areas, popping up from tables, sprouting from walls, sitting on the floor or hanging from the ceiling. The various units are linked by a half mile of hidden plumbing and wiring and controlled via a concealed computer system that both analyzes results and controls each appendage.

Living Things is now installed at the Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania until March 27, 2016. While these experimental installations remain artistic prototypes for now, they and other similar endeavors continue to explore the range of near-future applications for organic matter in everyday domestic settings and built environments.

But how does it work? “The 3D printed nylon knobs embedded in the surface of this workstation actuate eighteen valves which allow for the harvesting of Spirulina when the culture becomes dense enough, and the supply of fresh liquid media to each vessel. Inside the cabinet the pumps, tubing, manifolds, LED drivers, air pumps, heater connections and filters which comprise the heart of the life support system”

More from its creators: “The morphologies of hand-blown glass vessels function both as lighting and heating elements for the human occupants, and high functioning photobioreactors which provide heat, light, agitation, air supply, nutrient and waste control to the living algae inside.”

Offering more than a traditional storefront space or conventional shopping website could individually, this hybrid showroom allows shoppers to experiment with different combinations of furnishings and fixtures both physically and virtually.

Created by London studio Bureau de Change for Made.com, the space is designed with a series of screens as backdrops for various sets of staged furniture and fixtures, allowing accessory items to be projected alongside for shoppers to compare and evaluate in relation to physically-present pieces.

“The projections provide a true, adaptable representation of the products, at the right scale, in the right place. Without them, the room sets feel unfinished, so for us they were the missing link to achieving a flexibility you can normally only achieve online,” say the designers.

Again bridging the physical and digital, various displays have sample swatches that can be taken by would-be buyers but others also have tablets that will let people peruse related items or rearrange potential settings.

Like a gallery or work of installation art, the idea was to create something interactive that also made maximum use of limited and very expense London commercial real estate, drawing people in, serving a function but also engaging them beyond their past or expected shopping experiences.

“This is such a bustling street, with so many stores vying for your attention, we wanted to produce something unexpected – an idea that would set it apart from the traditional format of lots of products in a display. The space was designed on a tight budget and timeframe but [the designers] brought a lot of ingenuity and flair and turned an old rundown bookstore into a crisp, spacious and inviting design for our customers”

Chances are good that if you keep your phone nearby while you’re working, you’re going to be tempted to pick it up every now and then, checking Instagram and sending texts. Get in the habit of doing it compulsively, and you’re sucking away a lot of time that you should probably spend focusing on the tasks at hand. This lamp by designer Weng Xinyu aims to solve that problem by forcing you to give up your phone in order to illuminate your desk.

Consisting of a balancing lamp pole on a simple wooden tripod, the lamp leans its light source to the desk when it’s turned off. If you want light, you’ll have to insert your phone into the slot on the end of the pole. This turns the light on automatically and balances the lamp to its proper position.

Sure, you could cheat and find some other object that fits into the slot so you don’t have to give up your precious smartphone. But as we all heard from authority figures throughout our childhoods, the only person you’d be cheating is yourself.

“Superfluous information is flowing from everywhere,” says Xinyu. “The sense of priority is fading, resulting a precarious Balance between work and amusement, true and virtual life. It is time we ask the question, what do we really want? ‘Balance’ might help us find the inner balance in this information exploding society.”