DESIGN FOR LIVING MATT TYRNAUER

Early Modern The Hishou model airplane, from Yoshida, in Japan, looks like a Pentagon drone but is, in fact, a design that dates from the first years of aeronautics. The prototype of this A-shaped balsa-wood plane first flew in 1911, when it made a test flight over the Sumida River, in Tokyo. It's available at x-tremegeek.com.

One for the Roadster The American Roadster, in profile, looks like a classic racer from the 1930s. Examine it more closely, however, and you discover that there are only three wheels. The tri-wheel design allowed the Roadster's creator, John S. Greene, to get the vehicle classified as a motorcycle, which, in turn, allowed him to sidestep the billions of dollars in testing required for the research and development of new automobiles. Result: the first production hydrogen vehicle in the world. Because of Greene's fancy footwork, Roadster is available this month (eco-fueler.com) for less than $20,000. The four-cylinder engine is designed to run on compressed natural gas as well. You can go 450 miles on one tank.

Time Suunto invented the modern compass. Today the company makes a watch it calls a "wristop computer," the X9i, equipped with a compass, chronograph, altimeter, barometer, and, most important, G.P.S., which can interface with Google Earth. This allows adventurers to view their routes anywhere on the planet with satellite imagery. The X9i tells your computer where you have been, which enables you to zoom in from outer space to relive everything you saw on the ground.

Lapo of Luxury

An heir to the Fiat fortune—and to many Caraceni suits once owned by his grandfather Gianni Agnelli—Lapo Elkann has started his own fashion brand. Italia Independent (l-l for short) debuts with carbon-framed sunglasses whose design, Lapo says, is "soft but aggressive." Euro-fabulous goggle look guaranteed. Most sales will be on the Web at italiaindependent.com, where you can customize your l-l look with monograms and four different colors for the lenses and frames.

Big Marc Up Marc Newson trained as a jeweler and sculptor, "to raise silver teapots a la Georg Jensen," he says. In 2006 his riveted aluminum Lockheed Lounge chair—created in 1986—sold for $968,000 at Sotheby's in New York, the highest price ever paid for a work by a living designer. The distinctions between art and design—were there ever distinctions?—are becoming increasingly blurred in the eyes of the auction houses, galleries, and art groupies who drive the market. What 10 years ago may have been merely an uncomfortable chair is now elevated on a pedestal as Art. This month, the Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan gives Newson his first solo exhibition in the U.S. The designer is pushing the envelope in terms of complexity and luxuriousness of materials. There are sculptural marble chairs, a surfboard made of nickel, and a web-like shelf cut from a single block of Carrara marble. The forms are graphically simple, but, at times, defy technical explanation. Newson's theme is seamlessness, one he has preached and practiced in all of his work, from flashlights to airplane interiors—much as Raymond Loewy compulsively streamlined everything from locomotives to Lucky Strike boxes in the course of inventing the field of industrial design, in the 1920s. If Loewy were alive and working today, would Gagosian give him a show? That's the $968,000 question.