Tag Archives: Drawer

The Drawer That Actually Becomes 5 Portable Trays

Posted on by

Most storage furniture in an American home falls into one of two categories: too heavy to move without hurting yourself, or too flimsy to trust with anything heavier than folded T-shirts. You buy a dresser, it picks a room, and it stays there until you sell the house or drag it to the curb. There is rarely a middle option, something built to be light, mobile, and honest about the fact that furniture should adapt to how people actually live, not the other way around.

That gap is exactly where Keiji Ashizawa’s “Bon Drawer” sits, even though it was designed back in 2012 and never made it past the prototype stage. The piece is a lightweight steel frame on two wheels holding five stacked trays veneered in oak, and “bon” is simply the word for tray in Japanese, which tells you most of what you need to know about the concept. Pull a tray out of the frame and it stops being a drawer entirely. It becomes an object you can carry across a room, set on a table, hand to a guest. Push it back in and the frame does its job again, quietly, without asking for credit.

Designer: Keiji Ashizawa

I like that Ashizawa came to this from an unusual angle. He trained as an architect but spent time early on at a metalworking shop that made furniture and lighting, and you can feel that in how sparingly steel gets used here. The rail system is nothing more than a flat bar attached to gestural side supports, with small stops so the trays do not slide out when the whole unit gets tipped back onto its wheels for moving. No hidden mechanisms, no soft-close hardware, no reason to call a repair person in five years. The frame even comes apart for flat storage, which is a small detail that says a lot about how the whole thing was thought through from the start rather than bolted on at the end.

What strikes me is how differently we tend to approach the same problem. American design has spent the last decade chasing modularity through plastic bins, stackable cubes, and closet systems sold in kits. Functional, sure, but rarely something you would want visible in a living room. Bon Drawer solves the same problem of flexible storage without pretending the solution has to look disposable. It reads more like a piece of furniture that happens to be practical than a storage product that happens to look nice.

The part of this story that stayed with me is that it never got made. Ashizawa had it prototyped through Tanseisya and then it sat, undocumented outside a handful of design blogs, for over a decade, until Core77 resurfaced it late last month alongside a sibling piece called SLYBOX. Fourteen years is a long time for a good idea to wait for its moment, and I do not think that delay says anything bad about the design. If anything, it says something about how manufacturing decisions rarely track with how clever an idea actually is. Plenty of forgettable furniture gets mass produced every year. Plenty of smart, useful pieces sit in a portfolio because nobody made the case for them at the right time to the right buyer.

There is a reason Japanese design keeps finding new audiences in America right now, from Muji’s steady expansion to the wave of minimalist kitchenware showing up in design-forward apartments from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. It is not really about aesthetics. It is about restraint as a design principle, about trusting that a good idea does not need extra material to prove it is finished. Bon Drawer never sold a single unit, and it still manages to say more about smart storage than most of what is actually on the market. That is worth sitting with for a moment, especially the next time you are hauling a dresser up a narrow staircase and wondering why furniture has to be this heavy in the first place.

The post The Drawer That Actually Becomes 5 Portable Trays first appeared on Yanko Design.

Wall-mounted drawers offer storage that leaves your floor clear and free

Posted on by

Storage containers are inescapable facts of life, especially in this day and age where we collect so many material possessions. These vessels can range from plastic boxes to wooden furniture like shelves and cabinets, all of which trade floor space for that storage capacity. Unfortunately, floor space is also becoming a luxury these days, and we can’t simply expand the area in proportion to our growing storage needs. We need to be smarter about the way we use storage and what we use for storage, and no, stacking them up to the ceiling isn’t a viable solution nor a safe one. These drawers, in contrast, do offer a better alternative by taking advantage of the free space that we have found on our walls.

Designers: Camille Paillard and Romain Voulet

Storage boxes are a common sight in many households. They’re simple, convenient, and often stackable. They also take up precious floor space, and stacking them so high can become a safety hazard if left unchecked. Ideally, we’d “Marie Kondo” our excess possessions, but we’ll always still end up with stuff we can’t simply throw out. We obviously need more storage, but we also don’t have more floor space to use. What we do have, however, is plenty of free wall space that isn’t even taken up by decorations.

The KGT Wall Units evolved from metal storage boxes that could be individually stacked just like any conventional storage box. As the name implies, these boxes are mounted on a wall rather than lying on the floor. In this manner, they actually behave more like drawers rather than boxes, but the function and purpose are the same: to hide your possessions from view.

Of course, these can’t be stacked like normal boxes because they have to be screwed to a wall for stability. In fact, each unit has a fixed number of drawers, either one, three, or six in a vertical arrangement. There is one other variant where the drawers line up side-by-side, creating a long horizontal row instead. Of course, there’s no limitation on how you combine those units and how many you use. You could even have a whole stack of three six-unit drawers for a total of 18, or 18 individual drawers, presuming you have enough vertical clearance.

More than just their practical utility, however, these wall-mounted drawers add aesthetic value to a space, something ordinary stacked boxes don’t often provide. The gaps between each drawer bring some negative space that visually balances the unit, and the top of each unit becomes yet another space to utilize for things you want people to see. With a powder-coated finish, these seemingly floating drawers provide more than just smart storage but also visual interest to your space, all without cluttering your floor even further.

The post Wall-mounted drawers offer storage that leaves your floor clear and free first appeared on Yanko Design.