Cardboard Design: An Elegant Restaurant Created From Cardboard

Cardboard is one of those tricky materials to recycle. First it has to be separated since wet or greasy cardboard can’t be recycled (like boxes that have been rained on or pizza boxes). Once all the useable cardboard is separated, it can be reused all over the house or recycled into all kinds of things. Some artists do their part when it comes to recycling and reusing cardboard by making creative cardboard designs with it. We’ve featured lots of cardboard designs over the years, and my favorite has always been these Cardboard Shoes.

I’m sure the people who own the Carton restaurant in the Carton King Creativity Park in Taichung, Taiwan feel like they are doing their part to reuse as much cardboard as they can. After all, the entire inside of their restaurant (except for the food and the servers obviously) is made with cardboard. Yup, that includes the tables, chairs, highchairs, plates, lighting fixtures, walls, cups… everything! The person behind this outrageous idea is Huang Fang-liang, who is also the founder of a large paper goods company. He hopes the world will be inspired by this restaurant’s cardboard design, and people will begin to realize that cardboard can be used for so many different things.

According to the reviews I read, the food at the Carton restaurant is only average (and it’s expensive), but my guess is, people don’t go there for the food anyway. They go there to get a glimpse of one of the most incredible cardboard designs in the world. I wonder what designer or team of designers creates all those cardboard designs. And if you are wondering if the cardboard chairs are strong enough to sit on, no worries. They test them, and they are. Even though they are plenty strong enough, you can see a guy destroying one of them in the video below.