The Inouï table: furniture makes a fresh start at Morning

Every year in France, 250,000 tonnes of office furniture end up in landfill. Faced with this reality, the furniture industry is undergoing a genuine transformation, with new reuse and recycling practices coming to the fore. 

Among these innovations, some players have chosen to draw on the waste of other industries. That is the case with the Inouï table, created by the designers and cabinetmakers of the Morning team.

1. A table born of reuse

A reminder of the sustainability challenges facing the furniture sector

The furniture sector faces a major environmental challenge. In Paris alone, the equivalent of the furniture of a 150-employee company is thrown out every single day. More than half of France's medium-sized businesses are now committing to one of these environmentally responsible approaches. 

To cut down on waste, there are three sustainable approaches:

1/ Reuse  - “Take the same object and start again.”

This means putting the very same object back on the market for an identical purpose. Above all, this option avoids the production of new raw materials and does away with a manufacturing process altogether. 

2/ Repurposing - “Same material, different use, new story.” 

Repurposing means changing what an object is used for without altering its material. It is purely a matter of making changes to its form. For example: a chair turned into a stool, a shutter built into a coffee table, a table built around a train window ;)

3/ Recycling - “Nothing is lost, everything is transformed.” 

Recycling genuinely transforms the material so that it can be given new value in a different way. In this way, plastics from water bottles can find their way into the tops of meeting tables. Oyster shells can end up on a coffee bar top. 

The Inouï table: a perfect example of repurposing.

The Inouï table is one of those projects built on the repurposing of materials. Each piece is made from two distinct sources:
=> Train windows:
During a call for projects, Gaelle Kikteff and Daovone Sribouavong, experts in eco-design, helped us get our hands on a stock of train windows at Baudelet, at the time a specialist in dismantling SNCF stock. These windows were destined for the skip. 

=> Wooden chocks from inland waterway transport:
To take the concept of reuse all the way, the team set about finding a source for the wooden structure. These are solid fir planks from inland waterway transport. They were used to hold in place the large coils of sheet metal destined for the car industry, in the holds of the boats. Each load amounts to around a hundred planks.  

2. Materials that inspire the design

The dimensions of the reclaimed materials and their raw appearance called for a considerable amount of transformation work before they could be incorporated into the final object. These constraints guided the designers' research as they conceived a simple, light and smooth object.

=> A minimal design to make assembly easier

As the dimensions of the train windows could not be altered, they naturally led the designers to create a small piece of furniture. With the sections of wood also being modest in size, a simple yet timeless design imposed itself. The slenderness of the wooden pieces, for its part, made it possible to create a lightweight structure that lets you appreciate the translucency of the tabletop.

=> A smooth finish to soften the reclaimed look

Although these are reused materials, the idea was to arrive at a product with a polished result, far removed from the very raw visual language of some furniture made from reclaimed materials. To achieve this, we chose to soften the marks of time with a window film (ribbed glass) for a higher-quality result. As for the wood, we stained it to bring out its intrinsic qualities.

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3. A one-of-a-kind piece for your workspace

In 2025, professional spaces have evolved towards greater personality and warmth. This trend, known as “resimercial”, aims to create environments that combine the comfort of a domestic interior with the functionality of a professional space. The Inouï table, with its one-of-a-kind design, fits perfectly into this shift. 

Art at the office: far more than decoration

Art and design have the power to transform the atmosphere of a workspace. Some companies illustrate this in spectacular fashion. Pernod Ricard displays Dalí's La pêche aux thons in the lobby of its head office near Saint-Lazare. The Orange teams, for their part, enjoy a polyptych by Pierre Soulages at the head office in Issy-les-Moulineaux.

On our own scale, and in a more modest way, each Inouï table plays its own part in this transformation of spaces. The unique traces and marks on every tabletop tell a story and help create a warmer, more personal atmosphere in the offices that welcome them. Wall murals can produce the same effect. 

This kind of furniture adds to the appeal of working environments and answers a growing need among decision-makers: making teams want to come and work at the office.

To find out more about this movement that is redefining our offices, read our article on workspace design trends for 2025.

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* To find out more about the challenges of reuse in the furniture sector, read our dedicated article.
* Curious to see these tables for yourself? Head to Morning Boulogne and Morning Laborde! Make the most of your nomad offer to see them in the flesh.

* And if Morning furniture catches your eye, don't hesitate to get in touch. We love sharing our finds!

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