From felt stools to rubber lighting fixtures to benches made out of plastic tape, the typical creations of brothers Granger and Robert Moorhead wouldn’t look out of place on a futuristic film set.

“For us, designing furniture is a means of exploration, a pure exercise,” said Granger Moorhead, 35, who founded the Moorhead & Moorhead architecture and design firm with his brother about four years ago. “We’re interested in blurring the line between furniture and architecture.”

Such exploration has led the pair to create a spectrum of inventive pieces, the majority of which remain in the prototype stage. One recent standout is the “Tape Wound Borne,” an elegant circular bench measuring 5 feet in diameter, made of thick bands of hardened plastic tape, which resembles nothing so much as an enormous flattened ball of twine. The latticework created by the cross-hatchings of the tape gives the seat an unusually light appearance, and yet somehow it manages to be durable at the same time. To create the seat, the Moorheads utilized a technology that is often used in the creation of golf-club shafts and aerospace components such as aircraft fuselage. Their efforts earned them an award from Interior Design magazine.

“We’re very interested in designing pieces to see what the material can do,” Robert Moorhead, 32, said.

The brothers, who grew up in Fargo, N.D., have been working together since 2000, bringing complementary skills to the venture. Granger is a Yale-trained architect who used to work in the Manhattan offices of Steven Harris Architects. Robert studied industrial design at Rhode Island School of Design and cut his teeth at a custom metal fabrication shop in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

“It was when we were in school that we first started to realize we were headed in the same direction,” said Granger. “We used to talk about how great it would be to collaborate together.”

One of their first pieces was a sculptural stool constructed of felt that resembles an oversized fortune cookie. (A prototype of the stool resides in the permanent collection of the Yale University Art Gallery.)

When asked if the family affair of working together ever gets complicated, the brothers let out knowing laughs. “There’s a lot of discussion, posturing, and arguing,” said Granger. “The process of negotiating a design isn’t easy, but the result is better than what either of us could accomplish on our own,” added Robert.

Better, and more fantastical, perhaps. Last year, Moorhead & Moorhead created a proposal for the “Ready to Return,” a plastic molded couch in which shipping boxes are ingeniously hidden in the hollow of the sofa seat. When the owner has had enough of the sofa, the boxes are pulled out, the sofa taken apart, and the contents shipped back to the manufacturer, who recycles the pieces into raw material for a future production run. “People want to make furniture that lasts forever, and that’s one approach,” said Granger. “But we live in a disposable culture, and we wanted to try embracing it in some way.”

Not all Moorhead & Moorhead designs are so unconventional. The “Sidearm Chair” a sleek single sheet of molded plastic, bends to create a seat and rests on four stainless steel legs. The chair is one of the few Moorhead & Moorhead pieces that have gone into production, enjoying a limited run for Sublime American Design, a retail shop in TriBeCa.

Messrs. Moorhead would like nothing better than to see the rest of their furniture mass-produced: “We design everything because we think it would be great for production,” Granger said. “We’re not interested in creating expensive art furniture.” But they’re wary of taking on the production element of the work. “We respect the American model of designers who act as manufacturers, but we don’t want to go in that direction,” Robert explained.

In the meantime, until they land a deep pocketed production partner, they’ll continue dreaming up furniture prototypes in their sunny Canal Street office space and taking on architectural assignments. The Moorheads recently converted the second floor of a West Village townhouse into a pied-a-terre, creating an ingenious sliding wall system made of plastic molded panel doors that conceal the apartment’s bathroom and kitchenette. (“I was thinking of pop-out van doors,” Granger explained.) During the day, the translucency of the plastic allows sunlight to pass through the doors, and at night, when the kitchen is lit, the walls bathe the apartment with an ambient glow.

Such details allow the Moorheads to explore their greatest interest, the intersection between industrial design and architectural needs. “As much as we’d like it to happen, we don’t have a particular need for any one of these pieces to go into production,” Robert said, referring to their furniture prototypes. “These are as much calling cards as anything else.”