In our cramped modern-day apartments, storage space is always an issue! Hence, I’m always looking for innovative storage solutions, to amp up the storage quota of my home. And one kind of furniture that I love to invest in is – cabinets! Cabinets have come a long way from their quintessential and classic counterparts. Nowadays cabinet designs are fun, funky, and full of twists. And, we’ve curated some of our absolute favorites. From a slim wall cabinet that opens into a modern workplace to a cabinet that opens by tilting forward – these creative cabinet designs are the best storage solutions to invest in!
Turns out dreams do come true because Nils Holger Moorman has designed ‘der Vorstand’ – a slim wall cabinet that hides a functional home office! The black slender cabinet opens into a multifunctional work setup that creates a space for productivity while respecting your interior layout. The minimal structure features a back wall on wheels that rolls out with a simple pull and just like a pop-up book you get a work desk that comes with integrated bookshelves and top light. The convenient workstation maximizes your floor space and minimizes distractions. The fold-out ceiling creates a sense of a private cabin with essentials.
The Pivot rightfully uses gravity as a design feature! Instead of sliding drawers, a nifty little pivot joint at the base of this cabinet allows individual drawers to open by tilting forward. It’s clever, fun, and makes it easy to access your belongings without having to dig around! Just don’t expect it to be hyper-organized though!
In 1964, IBM released the 2401 Magnetic Tape Unit. It was designed to be used with IBM’s celebrated System/ 360 family of computers! Though this Magnetic Tape Unit is an icon in archives, it’s still a major source of inspiration! Love Hulten designed a commissioned storage cabinet called ‘MTC’, which is inspired specifically by the IBM 2401 Magnetic Tape Unit. Almost 57 years later, and this mesmerizing unit has still got it! Showcasing white, and the primary colors red and blue, the cabinet is a quirky piece of furniture perfect for storing all sorts of items.
The ROOM Collection of furniture by Erik Olovsson and Kyuhyung Cho is like IKEA but with a twist! Fundamentally, the ROOM Collection is a series of wooden blocks with geometric negative spaces that you can store things in. The blocks are modular, which means you can stack them on top of each other to build shelves or cabinets… but what’s different about them is their storage spaces which are represented by a variety of geometric cutouts, from your conventional squares and rectangles to the unconventional circles and ellipses, to even the bizarre triangles and hexagons!
This timeless-looking piece is crafted from solid wood finished off with rounded corners that give it an organic form. “We got the three elements from deconstructing traditional wooden cabinets and immovable system furniture,” says award-winning furniture designer Chuang. MOON allows the user to have a flexible lifestyle as this one cabinet serves many different purposes thanks to its modular build. You can combine, assemble, and deconstruct it to fit your space or transform it from storage to seating. Just like the phases of the moon, the shape of this cabinet changes to fit different needs – in fact, it has a little circular cutout detail to symbolize that. I love that you can stack it up or take it apart to change the height of the piece as a whole.
Designed by Mustafa Basaran for Gliese Design, The Mesh Sideboard is made up of an intersection of holed metals in different colors! The cute and quirky cabinet offers a spacious and protective space to store your important belongings.
Designed to look like furniture that meets Hollywood Squares, the Display Away cabinet is a reinterpretation of the traditional glass-faced cabinets often seen in homes, used to store trophies or chinaware. Designed by Stine Aas, the Display Away cabinet comes with a frosted glass front and individually backlit cabinet compartments that provide new aesthetic value to your belongings by showcasing them yet obscuring them from view. The silhouette art helps you appreciate your belongings literally from a different perspective, while also filling your room with a hauntingly beautiful diffused light that forms a halo around your personal belongings and objets d’art.
Designed as a series of silicone forms (that almost look like an enlarged picture of Velcro), the Geco Hub allows you to store your items in it by just pushing them right in. In a parallel universe without gravity, we’d probably be surrounded by storage units like the Geco Hub. You see, gravity allows us to simply place items on a horizontal surface, which is almost the fundamental aspect of a cabinet. The Geco Hub, on the other hand, grabs items almost like a pair of hands. Its silicone ‘fingers’ let you store everything from your keys to sunglasses, and from wallets to even post-it notes.
Storing wine in your bourgeois refrigerator is like eating gourmet food with your hands if you know what I mean. So here’s a cooling unit fit for your red and whites. Styled to look like a grand piano, the Samsung Zipel Wine Refrigerator by Lee Yongwoo truly looks grand. It comes with a flat top and also a small counter to keep your drinks. Four individual compartments have dedicated cooling units so that each compartment can have its own temperature. It’s a Cabernet cabinet!
The Fan Cabinet by Sebastian Errazuriz, is exactly what it sounds like! Inspired by a fan, this little wooden cabinet looks more like a piece of art than furniture. An origami-inspired fan takes over most of the left section of the cabinet, and it looks stunning!