By ZAHID SARDAR, San Francisco Chronicle

At the recent 60th annual Stockholm Furniture Fair, Offecct, a modern Swedish furniture company, unveiled surprisingly colorful, compact space-saving ideas.

Liquid crystals sandwiched between glass or polycarbonate sheets have been used in homes, hospital rooms and nightclubs as privacy partitions because they can be made opaque or clear with the flick of a switch. Electricity running through opaque liquid crystals realigns their molecular structure and makes them transparent.

Dry-erase whiteboards have become fixtures in offices, classrooms and even homes. Now there's a repositionable alternative to the porcelain-on-steel boards that offers an alternative wherever permanent or heavy wall fixtures are not an option.

San Francisco interior designer Claudia Juestel wanted a durable floor made of recycled material for a new wine and coffee bar/cafe designed by her company Adeeni Design Group, so she chose stoneware made in Modena, Italy.

These days, nearly every new building is sheathed in Tyvek, a white fabric made by Dupont from olefin polyethylene fibers. Fused under pressure and by heat, the fibers form a strong, flexible plastic material that repels water, resists aging, chemicals, mold and UV degradation.

Industrial designer Ran Lerner is on a mission to create long-lasting, ecological home products that don't mimic what is already in the market and, when possible, have a dual-purpose.

The 40-year-old Milan-educated Israeli met some of those goals with his new Grapevine wine rack for Umbra, the 30-year-old housewares and furniture company headquartered in New York.

When the 1991 Oakland, Calif., hills fire destroyed his home, lawyer James Molesky embarked on building a two-story Arts & Crafts-style replacement home. Along the way, he discovered offbeat ways to reduce costs.

Ever since she was a student at the Royal College of Art in London, Jane Ni Dhulchaointigh has been interested in fixing things easily. "And making people's lives better," she says.

Fueled by a robust DIY movement, designers and manufacturers are touting the satisfaction of personalizing a store-bought object or building something by hand.

Like an archaeological site, the past can be excavated for ideas. Los Angeles design-build architects Marmol Radziner did just that to create a new line of furniture called Vienna Way.