Warsaw-founded furniture brand Tylko is entering hi-fi with a speaker built on a reversal of the usual logic: instead of a shelf cavity compromising a speaker’s sound, the shelving grid becomes part of the speaker system itself. Developed with French architect Paul Cournet‘s Rotterdam studio CLOUD and Rotterdam-based acoustics studio Form Follows Frequency, Tylko Sound marks the brand’s first move into hi-fi. The collection bets that solving the physics of a speaker inside furniture is worth more to buyers than hiding the speaker altogether.
The idea surfaced during the development of Tylko’s Berlin showroom, where Cournet kept returning to a specific observation: the brand’s modular shelving was already a grid built for sound, yet nobody had designed a hi-fi speaker system specifically to live inside it. A cavity usually works against that goal — embedding a speaker in furniture typically adds resonance and colors the tone rather than staying neutral. Tylko Sound reverses that relationship by engineering the enclosure to integrate precisely into the shelving system rather than sit inside it as an afterthought. “The challenge was to design a speaker that wouldn’t be affected by the shelf around it — by carefully engineering the enclosure and integrating it precisely into the shelving system, we created a speaker that performs consistently wherever it is placed.”
The Tylko Coax Speaker anchors the system, built around a coaxial driver for a clear, balanced sound image across a room, with the setup scaling from a single speaker to a full stereo configuration with one or more subwoofers. Baltic birch plywood forms the enclosure, handcrafted in Poland and chosen as much for its acoustic density as for matching the material used throughout Tylko’s furniture line — the speaker and the shelf it sits in share the same physical vocabulary rather than two unrelated materials forced together.
A high-gloss lacquer finish, available in Signal Red, Mint Green, and Chalk White, puts the speakers on visible display rather than concealing them behind grille cloth or a cabinet door. “The incredible relationship between sound and architecture is achieved through design. Here, the speaker is the perfect vehicle for that experience.”
Pricing lands near €500, or roughly $570 per speaker — the Coax Speaker runs €491 ($562), the Bass Reflex version €516 ($590), both sold in pairs, with the Tylko Subwoofer at €970 ($1,110). “For approximately €500 per speaker, Tylko Sound proves that stepping into hi-fi no longer requires a premium-budget investment.” The limited-edition hi-fi system is currently available across seven European markets: Germany, Austria, Belgium, Poland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France.
Speakers built to be seen rather than hidden aren’t unique to Tylko — Karimoku’s OJAS pursues a comparable sculptural approach to sound equipment in Tokyo, while Samsung’s collaboration with Erwan Bouroullec follows a similar designer-brand structure applied to a different category of listening object. Tylko Sound’s distinction is treating the shelf itself, not just the speaker, as the shared acoustic and visual system.