Alessi’s Pop-Up isn’t the first pressurized bottle opener we’ve ever seen, but it’s easily the classiest. Designed by Giovanni Alessi Anghini—great-grandson of the Italian manufacturer’s founder—it’s the designer’s first solo effort, having recently completed a short stint at Stefano Giovannoni’s studio. Simply clamp the mirror-polished steel device down on a bottle’s neck and with a gentle push, the cap pops off, held in check by a magnet inside; $47. www.alessi.com

Antlers may be out of fashion but no one ever said anything about hippopotamus butts: For his black polyester resin Trophy Hangers for Charles and Marie, New Zealand designer Phil Cuttance sliced up three common game animals—hippos, giraffe, and, yes, the omnipresent-but-still-cute-in-miniature moose—using their heads and hindquarters to create three, uh, cheeky sets of coat hooks; $50. www.charlesandmarie.com

For Umbra’s latest U+ line, the Canadian manufacturer’s design team looked to the Goodwill next door for inspiration, harvesting everyday objects like old suits and mismatched glassware and then classing them up a notch for production. The collection’s Balloona stool, by recent University of Alberta graduate Natalie Kruch, also turns water into wine, transforming a naked wooden seat and what looks like the reject pile of a frustrated birthday party clown into a whimsical Campana-esque piece. Constructed by stretching 500 multi-colored ballooons around a frame with an open top, the stool has a slightly elastic surface that makes for the perfect perch; $350. www.umbra.com and www.natattack.ca

Over the years, Acme Studio founders Adrian Olabuenaga and Lesley Bailey have persuaded everyone from Sottsass to Sagmeister, Boym to Branzi, to lend their designs to the Hawaii-based company's catalog of watches, pens, leather goods, and the like. This fall, Israeli-born, New York–based designer Ran Lerner, formerly of Adam Tihany's studio, joins that growing roster of luminaries. Lerner's Step Watch is marked by single, elegant element: three tiers of concentric steel rings on the watch's face mirrored by a neon laddered hand that ticks the time away. Price upon request.  www.acmestudio.com

At this summer’s inaugural 100% Design Shanghai, local designers Lyndon Neri & Rossana Hu launched an eponymous tabletop and furniture collection to be distributed by Design Republic, the husband-and-wife team’s two-year-old retail outpost in the Chinese metropolis. Each piece in the Neri & Hu collection is handmade and inspired by traditional Chinese artifacts: A series of mirrors based on the form of slim, bamboo household ladders; an ashtray inspired by a calligraphy brush rest; a lacquered bowl that interprets an ancient Qing dynasty relic. For their Extrude stools (above), Neri and Hu abstracted a segment of bamboo, exaggerating its scale; their People series (below) is similarly based on the human form. www.neriandhudesign.com or www.thedesignrepublic.com

For Casamania this year, Philadelphia-based designer Josh Owen debuted SOS, the veritable Swiss Army knife of stools. Made of lightweight 100 percent recyclable polyethylene, the seat features curved handles on either side for securing wine glasses or cups, a rimmed top that can be used as a tray, and a hollow inner core; turn the thing over and use it as a super-sturdy indoor/outdoor planter or vase. Or you can, you know, sit on it. The multi-tasking stool was recently admitted to the permanent collection at Paris’s Centre Georges Pompidou and is available for sale at Unica Home. www.joshowen.com

RISD grad Joe Gebbia’s first product was CritBuns, a dimpled rubber cushion that offered respite to design students enduring butt-wrenching crits. That same demographic might benefit from the designer’s latest offering as well: For San Francisco–based Citizen: Citizen, Gebbia created Untitled, a series of blank white sketchbooks in the guise of limited-edition art objets. (Possible uses may include penning secret hate mail to those exacting profs.) Gebbia used the idea of a galley proof—the test book created prior to printing to gauge everything from the fineness of paper stock to the quality of binding—and turned it into the object itself. The result is an elegant series of different sized books, spiral- or perfect-bound, unmarked except for a library card–like slip tucked inside the cover to describe the project’s intent: “By generating only a single book, it subverts mass production practice and becomes a craft object,” Gebbia explains. Available at Citizen: Citizen for $95 a piece. www.citizen-citizen.com

First there was Tivoli, which packed walloping hi-fi sound inside a pert, ’60s-style plastic package. Indonesian designer Singgih Kartono’s Magno, available through Areaware, arrives like an eco-friendly heir to that retrograde throne, with styling that evokes the feel-good ’70s, three sizes all done up in smooth-edged, sustainably harvested, uncoated wood. Kartono, though, isn’t some greenwashed novitiate: The radios are assembled by hand in the designer’s native village of Kandangan, where Kartono helped built a craft-based community to shore up a floundering agricultural economy. And don’t be fooled by the old-school knobs and dials: AM/FM and transistor frequencies are accompanied by a line in for the MP3 player of your choice. Prices start at $200 for the small. www.areaware.com

The first in a series of lights by Italian-born, New York-based architect Sergio Mannino and Dutch-born, New York-based designer Jan Habraken, Lamp OOO!—so named, we'd guess, for the three 10-watt circular bulbs that screw to the underside of a slim top flank—is an aluminum table lamp that can be pulled over the arm of a couch to facilitate easy reading or stacked with books and magazines to keep catalog clutter at bay. While they search for a manufacturer, the designers plan to sell 99 signed, limited-edition lights together with a curated selection of books. Pricing upon request. www.janhabraken.com or www.sergiomannino.com

A limited-edition quilt, pieced and machine-stitched by Connecticut-based designer Denyse Schmidt, is the latest piece commissioned by the Philip Johnson Glass House Foundation, joining a collection that over the years has included cherry-wood stools inked by their nonagenarian designer, Jens Risom, and limited-edition prints of the house itself by Julius Shulman. Schmidt found inspiration in the modernist icon’s “subtle layering of details” and the resulting quilt is a spare, 86x93-inch blanket of ecru cotton, stitched with figure-8s and splashed with a lone band of striated color. Each is hand-signed and available for $1,500. www.philipjohnsonglasshouse.org