Castor may be the quintessential Toronto design firm. Sarcastic, cynical and self-deprecating, their pieces are often a piss-take on stereotypic Canadiana: limestone stools look like ­beaver-gnawed tree trunks, and vintage headphones are fastened to bronze antlers. The offbeat collective, run by Brian Richer and Kei Ng, is the design equivalent to the indie band: both have trendy, gritty cred while coming dangerously close to the mainstream they rebel against.

Like their work, their dust-choked studio has a hoser-chic allure. Hiding out on a sad-sack street near Bloor and Lansdowne, the place is an absurdist shrine to the firm’s namesake (castor means beaver in French): a taxidermic specimen wearing an oversized club-kid headset sits in a glass case, with a close-up Polaroid of a beaver’s mouth hanging above. If the McKenzie brothers had been designers, their atelier would probably have looked something like this.

The way Parkdale is fashionable in its scruffiness, Castor’s designs have a polished lack of polish. The company’s tagline is “Make Shit Look Good”—a tuque-and-brewski version of Baudelaire’s “you gave me mud, and I turned it to gold.” Among Castor’s best-selling products are their Recycled Tube Lights ($1,250–$2,300), made from an assemblage of reclaimed, burned-out fluorescent tubes. (Castor’s first light fixtures were crafted from bulbs that once illuminated Toronto’s TD Centre, giving them a historical cachet.) Avant-gardist in their rawness, they now dangle, like giant floating cigarettes, at such restaurants as Terroni and Delux, and the club Circa. There’s even one in Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel. Although they have a DIY appeal, they actually took a year to divine and perfect. “This light is very considered,” says Richer. “People look at it and think, oh, I could just bash it all together, but it’s very hard: we had to use a lot of trigonometry to work it out.” Richer also recycled a beaten-up wooden stool from an abandoned duck blind and dubbed it the Blind Stool, which now sells for $1,900 at Klaus. He cast a replica in aluminum from the one found on his 400-acre property north of Kingston, preserving the original grain and rust patina. “It’s us and some hillbilly duck hunter working together,” says Richer. “Only he doesn’t know it.”

Castor’s penchant for rescue and reinvention speaks to the design world’s current love affair with upcycling. (Recycling is a term primed for the blue bin.) It’s a trash-turned-treasure fad for all that is storied, second-hand and time scarred, reflecting a chronic cultural nostalgia for some simpler, golden age that never existed. The way the Romantics turned to Grecian urns during industrialization, we’re turning to reclaimed furniture.