Gallery: Awesome Kitchen Objects Inspired By Ordinary Garage Items

Inspiration comes in all sorts of shapes and forms. Still, it's striking nonetheless when those shapes and forms are quite literally plumbed from your everyday garage or local hardware store, in order to appear in your kitchen.

For their aptly-named "Garage Series," designers Philip Stankard and Jon Alling of the Wisconsin-based product development studio Human Crafted, created a functional and amusing collection of housewares resembling typical garage staples like bottles of motor oil, funnels and pegboards.

Garage Series, which first appeared at this year's Design MMoCA biennial event at Wisconsin's Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, found its origins in the museum's collection of stark black and white images by photographer Steven D. Foster, which also bears the same name. From there, Stankard and Alling continued to play on the theme of garages and their archetypal contents, and how those items can be repurposed into new forms and functions. Thanks to Julia Child, pegboards have been common kitchen wall fixtures for decades now, but Stankard and Alling's attractive walnut versions differ for their spiffy use of bungee cords and 3D-printed hooks resembling twist-ties. Other items include a coaster fashioned from tile spacers that take on almost houndstooth-like pattern when connected and sturdy funnel-shaped hooks cast from cement.

Check out more kitchen-friendly items from the collection (now available for purchase) below.

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