So many beautiful, interesting, and just downright strange pieces of furniture came across our desks this year that it was tough to pick favorites. But following a refreshing bout of Core77's end-of-year staff tradition—spontaneous in-office wrestling matches—we emerged with fresh enough eyes to pick the standouts:

The Beautiful

Bruce Shapiro's astonishing Sisyphus table uses sand, steel balls and hidden, CNC-driven magnets to turn its surface into a series of Zen garden masterpieces.

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Christopher Duffy's Abyss Table marshals CNC-cut plywood and glass to bring ocean topography into your home or office.

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Industrial designer Cairn Young and cabinet maker Ian Spencer's Cubrick incorporates some brilliantly-engineered rotations to turn the cabinet inside-out.

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Love Hultén's assortment of furniture combines brass, walnut and technology to create wonderfully unexpected pieces that combine old and new.

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Urbanproduct's mastery of wood has led them to create gorgeous wall tiles, cabinet pulls, storage units, retail installations and more.

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So flowing are Joseph Walsh Studio's organic wooden creations that it's hard to believe they were created by human beings using tools rather than elven magic.

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The Innovative

Version 1.0 of Izzy Swan's portable folding picnic table is a stunning feat of DIY engineering.

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Thijs Smeets' LiliLite shelf, for those who like to read in bed, has the cleverest of page-saving/light-switching mechanisms.

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With what we imagine required monumental patience, Sebastian Errazuriz has been rethinking the way storage furniture opens and closes.

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The students at Kobe Design University's "Design Soil" program wowed us with a series of fantastic furniture-based experiments.

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In "Furniture that Hides," we looked at a series of innovative pieces that nest, stack, disappear into each other and/or steal the souls of those that behold them.

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From the Space10 design lab came this design for a sit-stand desk with a functional twist.

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Jamie Terbeest isn't sure a standing desk ought be freestanding at all. In "Wall-Mounted Standing Desk, Yea or Nay?" readers sounded off on the merits and drawbacks of Terbeest's counterproposal.

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We finally got a video look at Robert Van Embricqs' slat-based flatpack furniture.

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The Unusual

Mathematician Alex Bellos's elliptical pool table was probably the strangest commission ever received by the UK's Snooker and Pool Table Company.

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Lee Wen's crazy ping pong table will let you take on as many challengers as you can handle, all at the same time.

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Dai Sugasawa's Bipod Table is transported like, and sets up like, a sniper rifle.

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Who knew? Turns out trashed skateboard decks, with all those laminated layers, make for some stunning tabletops, as evidenced by the folks at Focused Skateboard Woodworks.

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This surprise of a two-person conversation bench might be the world's most simple, and most structurally interactive, piece of furniture.

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When we saw the Atlas Table, we had to ask you: How the heck did they make this?

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An adjustable drafting table is not a cheap piece of furniture. That's why engineering-savvy Sean Hendrick made his own.

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Scott Rumschlag's another engineer who's been bitten by the furniture bug. Check out his amazing DIY, counterweight-based height-adjustable standing desk.

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For those that would rather not stand at all, the Altwork is a four-position workstation that lets you lay down on the job.

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I'll tell you who's not laying down on the job: Us! Stay tuned for more of our 2015 Year-End Roundup, which we'll get back to as soon as we finish this afternoon's suplex contest.

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More from Core77's 2015 Year in Review

• 15 of Your Favorite Posts from 2015

• The Coming Age of Automobility and What It Means for Designers

• 10 Clever, Innovative or Bizarre Design Processes from 2015

Material News You Can Use

• 10 Brilliant and Beautiful Objects from Our 'Designing Women' Series

• 12 Projects to Inspire Future Living

• Design Entrepreneurs Were Killing it in 2015

• The Year in Furniture Designs, Part 2: Design/Build Techniques and Learning from the Past and Present

• 15 Tools and Tool-Based Projects We Loved in 2015

• 8 New Types of Digital Fabrication Machines

• 17 Random and Amazing Phenomena We Saw This Year

• The Best Product Design GIFs of 2015