match. light.

Nothing very practical about this "museum piece" but Match Light is just fun to look at. It's your basic giant match leaning up against a wall that lights up. It's made of wood and plastic, comes with a red and white tip, and costs a shockingly low $189 (shockingly for funky furniture, that is). But wait, there's a catch...it's listed as "out of stock indefinitely." Oh well, can't imagine demand was too high for this baby.

podium.

If you worship your iPod so much that you literally want to put it on a pedestal, check out the Podium from pARTicular (yeah, they cap the "ART" part). This over-engineered wonder gives you "easy accessibility to iPod functions in standing or sitting heights" along with an aluminum column to hide your cables in, hand-selected Brazilian cherry hardwood that's been "CNC-machined" to fit the cradle in a recessed surface, and the all important oversized base plate "securing the iPod's stability with aluminum hardware." Wow. It'll set you back $400, which is more than your iPod costs. One question...why didn't they call this the iPodium?

royalton.

The Royalton is a bit of an older design (1991) from Philippe Starck but it's got two things going for it: 1) It looks great. 2) It's actually comfortable. If you've shopped for unusual high end furniture before, you know those two things can be hard to come by! This piece has a steel frame fleshed out with polyurethane foam, with polished aluminum front feet and pearwood back feet. You can get it with the arm on either the left or right side, and the pouf is optional.

zigzag.

The ZIGZAG from LYX is made from what looks like one continuous piece of aluminum. A little foam and a spray on velvet finish (done via "Swiss deep flocking" -- sounds, um, interesting) complete the look. Michael Malmborg's inspiration for this piece: "The design concept is the same as when you write a complete sentence without lifting the pen in a circle!"