BEIRUT: It’s a chair and definitely appears to be a chair, but look a little bit closer and you’ll find some unexpected elements.

This is the vision posed by Lebanese-born furniture designer Niloufar Afnan, 29, who has taken inspiration – as well as spare parts – from the streets of Beirut to create furniture that is familiar but also entirely new.

“If you notice on the streets there are always chairs lying around, there are always random objects that make something else functional, and that was my inspiration,” Afnan tells the Daily Star on a recent trip to Beirut.

The designer is now based in London, having recently graduated from the furniture design program at Central Saint Martin’s University and participated in London’s New Designers exhibition as well as London Design Week.

Afnan’s current collection has won praise and includes a table made from 46 different table legs found by trawling the streets of London. The legs have been welded together by a metal structure that serves as the table’s zigzag-like surface.

The basis for her ideas, such as the table, came from research she conducted in Beirut in the summer of 2010 during which Afnan recreated chairs on the streets of the city out of nontraditional chair components.

“I did experiments in the city to see how people would respond to chairs that were fixed or random objects that were put together to make another chair or stool,” says Afnan, adding that the chairs were then left out on the streets and photographed over the course of two weeks to observe how people made use of them. And people did sit in them until they were eventually swept up by other street collectors or Sukleen workers.

“They look really random and abstract or surreal,” Afnan says of the chairs in her project, “you have a parking pole replacing the leg of a broken chair, or here you have concrete and wire that you see everywhere that is also replacing a leg. So these were scattered around the city and they were left to see if there was any interaction at all and people did sit on them.

“For two years I focused on how to transform an object into another function but without really altering its form or playing with its familiar aspects – so you we recognize it, like you recognize a bucket or a table leg, but they’re serving more than just what they were originally doing.”

This concept also led to another hot item in her current collection called the royal stool.

Inspired by a discarded Royal Mail bag (used by postmen to carry mail in the U.K.), Afnan decided to stuff the bag and place it over a bucket to create a comfy seat. A metal ring that is pushed down over the cushion onto the bucket holds the seat together.

Afnan hopes that her innovations using common materials will encourage a culture of finding new uses for the things around us, rather than just discarding something that is broken.

“The idea is that anything can be functional as long you’re resourceful and find a solution.”

Compared to Londoners, Afnan believes that Beirutis have a knack for this sort of creative reuse of the things around them, saying that in London the tendency is to throw away anything that is not new.

“My whole purpose is to challenge your understanding of an object, so you do not take it for granted. If you get a broken chair or a broken cup, don’t just throw it away; it can be reused in another way to find a new purpose. So I hope to encourage that kind of behavior.”

Though based in London for the moment, Afnan grew up between Montreal and Beirut. She is hoping to bring her designs here in the near future and has further plans to display her jewelry in Beirut showings in February and April.

Her oriental-inspired, handmade jewelry pieces are currently for sale in the Beirut boutique, Orient 499.