Behold a breakthrough in the design and technology of goofing off. It's the Zephyr, an award-winning hammock from a Providence, R.I.-based company called Heliotrope. Priced just under $1,000, the high-tech hammock sounds like a digital slingshot or a nuclear barbecue -- an excessive elaboration of a primitive device. The camping hammock is, after all, quite a rudimentary form of furniture. It's more advanced, perhaps, than the tree stump and the flat rock, but not by much.

And if there is luxury about a hammock, it lies in having the leisure to loll away a few hours swaying between some trees rather than in the thing itself. The Zephyr is impressive not only because it's done beautifully, but because it has been done at all. "The traditional hammock works and has a nice look," said Gary Wolf, the Boston architect who designed the Zephyr. "I didn't want to make something that was so self-conscious that you couldn't imagine lying down on it."

He said the lyrical image of the hammock emerged from a sketch he did long before he became partners with Alan Wittemore, a former architectural client, in a new outdoor- furniture business. "It began with the silhouette, the notion of an undulating relaxed line." The actual hammock looks like little but a silhouette -- a single length of sensuously bent aluminum serves as the hammock's frame. (It's actually three pieces of aluminum, which makes it easier to make and ship.) It looks like the first line of a three-dimensional sketch of a boat, but it was designed to maximize stability and concentrate the load it carries at the midpoint of the base.

This hammock is available with bars mounted perpendicular to the frame or with what's called the heliotrope base. This is a stainless-steel connection, set in concrete, named for the flower that follows the sun. It anchors the hammock but allows it to be rotated to catch the sun or breezes. This base makes the hammock appear weightless and just a bit precarious, even though the design is stable. "Once we decided that there would be buyers who wouldn't need to drag it around their property, we saw that there was a way to get rid of legs," Wolf said. "In an ideal world, none of the hammocks would have legs."

The heliotrope base prevents the hammock from being dragged around the yard. But it does increase the attractiveness of the product for resorts, cruise ships and others who get a lot of mileage out of their hammocks and are willing to spend more to get one that lasts. Wolf said that once he started looking at hammocks, he observed that they are usually the most weather-beaten objects around. Their painted steel frames rust, the rope gets dirty and mildewed, and the spreaders rot. There are, he found, some attractive hammocks on the market, but none that are really durable.