In southern Tel Aviv, an urban landscape once bustling with small workshops and storefronts is now on the verge of decay. In an effort to infuse this dwindling community with a touch of modern style, a team of young designers at Ariel Zuckerman studio have begun to essentially harvest street art from the urban ecosystem and turn it into unique and modern furniture items.

According to Designboom, the team attached wooden boards to various walls around their neighborhood, supplying a perfect canvas for local street artists. Checking back often, they observed the surfaces beginning to evolve. “It took several nights before we deemed the results to be complete,” Zuckerman’s team told Designboom. “We didn’t to say anything to anyone, as we were curious to see how it would evolve in the most ‘natural’ manner.” Once enough layers of graffiti had built up on the boards, the designers removed them and used them to build a dresser.

The original mural.
Photo: Ariel Zuckerman.

If this unceremonious removal seems a bit unfair to the graffiti artists, consider the average lifespan of a street artwork.

“From a piece of graffiti to a useful piece of furniture, and from random night-time inspiration to a commemorated artistic time capsule,” is how the designers describe their enterprise, which has since grown to produce other graffiti-inflected furnishings like a table and bedside chests. No word on how much these functional works of art sell for, but we can’t imagine anything cooler to have around the house.

Watch the Street Capture team’s graffiti-harvesting practice: