Tag Archives: shelf

The panels on this crockery shelf are actually designer plates that you can remove and dine in!

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A wonderful twist on how crockery gets stored in cabinets, the Gere Multifunctional Crockery Shelf turns your plates into decorative panels that contribute to the furniture’s aesthetic. The Gere Multifunctional Crockery Shelf looks like a gorgeous piece of furniture with abstract art on the front… but what appears to be art is, in fact, a series of partitioned plates for eating different food. Each plate has a uniquely different partition design, which not only contributes to the shelf’s eye-catching facade, but also makes eating a rather fun experience! Behind each plate lies a storage area for your other crockery, giving you a fun, yet functional shelf for your kitchen!

Designer: Florian Beser

The inspiration behind Gere stems from the growing trend of minimalism and the need to optimize small living spaces. The project focuses on addressing the issue of large shelves filled with round plates that result in wasted space. The goal is to create a crockery shelf that is compact yet caters to the storage needs of individuals in smaller households.

To achieve this goal, the design team employed a comprehensive research process that included surveys, market analysis, interviews with the target audience, and the creation of a user journey map. The insights gained from this research provided a deep understanding of kitchen storage preferences, structuring items in the kitchen, and interaction points with shelves and plates.

Gere seamlessly combines shelves and plates, utilizing the plates to form a relief-like front for the shelf. This unique design creates additional interior space that can be efficiently utilized to store more crockery, cups, glasses, and other kitchen essentials. The gridlike structure of Gere allows for scalability, enabling larger or smaller versions to cater to different household sizes.

Ideal for placement in kitchens or dining rooms, Gere can be hung on the wall. The individual rows of plates can be folded down, providing easy access to stored items or allowing the removal of a plate from the front. The plates themselves feature segments, enabling users to separate main courses and side dishes on a single plate for convenient transportation. In addition to the front storage, Gere offers additional shelf space for storing crockery, cups, glasses, and more, making it a modularly expandable crockery set.

The functionality of Gere relies on the careful consideration of material properties. The shelf is crafted from local oak wood, chosen for its sturdiness and resistance to water. The plates, conceptualized using 3D graphic software, are 3D printed, translated into plaster molds, and ultimately cast in porcelain.

Specifications for Gere include 240mm x 240mm x 20mm dimensions for the plates and a prototype shelf measuring 1200mm x 200mm x 1300mm. The customizable size of the shelf ensures that Gere can be tailored to the specific needs and preferences of different users.

Gere stands as a testament to the marriage of form and function in the realm of kitchen storage. Its innovative design not only maximizes space utilization but also brings an element of aesthetic appeal to the utilitarian aspect of crockery storage. As the demands of modern living continue to evolve, Gere offers a practical and elegant solution for those seeking to optimize their living spaces without compromising on style or functionality.

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Modular Shelf Inspired by Japanese Woodwork Solves Your Storage Issues & Is Easy On The Pocket

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A beautiful piece of furniture can complete a room. It can be the final piece that makes a space come full circle, building a comfortable and cohesive haven, rather than a random area. Furniture pieces make or break a home, they add on to the essence or soul of a home, hence one needs to be extremely picky while choosing a furniture design. The design should be a reflection of you, and what you want your home to be. When you place a piece of furniture in a room, it should instantly integrate with the space, creating a wholesome and organic environment. And one such furniture design is the Japanese-inspired Altitude Shelf.

Designer: Evan Clabots for Cozey

Designed by Evan Clabots for the affordable furniture brand Cozey, the Altitude Shef is a new line of shelving inspired by the clean lines and minimal form of traditional Japanese woodworking. Although inspired by Japanese furniture, we can see bits of traditional Danish furniture in the piece as well. The shelving design is marked by clean minimal lines and no back panels which ensures that the design is open, airy, and free-flowing.

As simple as the Altitude shelf looks, it is also equally simple to install. The shelf requires the includes nails and an Allen wrench to assemble it, after which the installer needs to tape the included placement poster to create the perfect placement and mark the nail holes. A nail spacer is utilized to ensure that the ideal amount of nail is not screwed, to provide the shelf with a sturdy frame.

The Altitude shelf features a simple and subtle design that can stand by itself as a single unit, or as multiple units to form a modular and spacious configuration that can hold multiple items. An Altitude shelf can hold up to 90 pounds and you can select between three finishes – Walnut, Oak, and Black Wood. What sets the shelf apart even more is that prices start at $165 for a set of one and $990 for a set of six – making it a pretty economical piece as well for your living space.

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This minimal multifunctional furniture design can be configured into a bookcase, base unit or room divider

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One problem that never seems to leave us, especially if you’re living in a major city – is the lack of space! If you’re an independent millennial who recently moved out of their family home and into their own, then a major issue that you may be dealing with almost every day…is space constraints in your own home. Our modern millennial homes have many virtues, but one thing they lack is space! Space constraint is something most of us end up dealing with every day. Smart storage solutions can be lifesavers in such tricky and compact situations. If you add modularity to the list of traits this solution possesses, then it’s the ultimate storage solution. And one such solution I recently came across is the Fréquence shelf by Jean Couvreur.

Designer: Jean Couvreur for Kabata 

Designed by Jean Couvreur for Kabata, the Fréquence shelf is a minimal and sophisticated shelving design that functions as a multifunctional piece of modular furniture. It was also presented at Maison& Objet 2021. Boasting clean aesthetics, in a stark white color, what makes Fréquence special is the fact that it functions as a bookcase, base unit, or room divider. It comprises of a couple of geometrically shaped modules that can be combined, and mixed, and matched to create a variety of designs, in accordance with your personal taste and the requirement of your home.

You can configure the modular elements to create a small bookcase that stands close to the ground or even a large room divider for a larger living space. Fréquence is “the expression of a sober and efficient construction principle based on the exploitation of all the properties of aluminum,” said Kabata. This construction principle is a pretty significant one, since it, reduces the loss of material in the manufacturing process by 10 percent.

The different individual modules can be played around with, allowing you to create visually interesting furniture designs, owing to the rather geometric and quirky shape of the modules. Fréquence is built from aluminum, which is a pretty sturdy material and makes for a durable and hardy shelf with a smooth industrial feel, which is accentuated by the organic and dynamic shape of the furniture piece.

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Plant-shelf with textured glass helps add greenery and a sense of mystique to your interior space

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The textured design helps obscure the plants in a way that creates visual drama, while also creating a mini greenhouse of sorts that allows sun to reach the plant’s leaves in a wonderful, diffused manner.

Meet Hazy, an office shelf that works as a planter-holder as well as a base for a whiteboard. With an aesthetic that’s best described (by the designer no less) as high-quality Nordic style, the Hazy has a clever way of being minimalist and clean. The shelf itself is rather simple to look at, with a choice between horizontal or vertical columns on which you can mount things. The vertical columns let you attach planters (simply by screwing them in place) one above each other, so that water trickles from the upper planters to hydrate the lower planters, and a fluted glass panel helps obscure the planters in an aesthetic and curiosity-engaging way, doing the job of frosted glass. If you want something more functional and utilitarian, switch over to the horizontal shelves and swap out the glass panel for a whiteboard and you have yourself something that’s much more productivity-focused.

Designer: Studio TZEN

Hazy creates a building block of office furniture that can be used in a variety of ways. You can have multiple units in your office, with some being planter-holders, and others being shelves with whiteboards. Wheels on the base of the Hazy let you move it around, orienting it in ways that either help decorate or dissect your office space into smaller chunks. Hazy was designed by Italy-based Studio TZEN for Onmuse, a global interior decor brand.

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LG teases experimental transparent OLED TV that doubles as a shelf, notification center, and artificial fireplace

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Although transparent OLEDs haven’t really become mainstream yet, it’s worth thinking about some of the places they could actually be useful. Take the OLED Shelf, for example – an award-winning concept from LG. Designed to blend right into your home’s decor, the OLED shelf comes with a mantelpiece on top, and a transparent glass panel on the base, running all the way to the floor. Where reality truly blurs into magic is when a part of the transparent glass panel comes to life with pixels, turning into a television. Designed to be a shelf, television, notification center, or even an ambient light, the OLED Shelf truly puts transparent displays to good use – and with the ability to selectively activate pixels, it really creates an experience that feels magical, with transparent glass suddenly turning into opaque dynamic images!

Designer: LG Display Co., Ltd.

With every sufficiently advanced technology, its most important metric of success comes from its perceived application. A good product drives customer adoption, which then helps bring down the price of the tech, making it even more accessible. It’s the reason why folding phones and rolling TVs have failed to bring down the price of flexible OLED touchscreens because the tech hasn’t become the commercial success companies hoped it would. Transparent OLEDs suffer a similar fate – the right product isn’t driving the right demand, which is a prerequisite to help bring costs down and production up. That’s where LG’s OLED Shelf hopes to rectify things.

Sort of a Serif TV moment for transparent displays, the OLED Shelf is both a television as well as a mantelpiece, allowing you to place objects on top of it. The TV, for the most part, remains transparent (and therefore blank), but switch it on and the glass magically springs to life. The plain wall behind the TV provides the perfect blank canvas to allow you to see images clearly (a patterned wallpaper would probably create a visual conflict). Moreover, the transparent panel can be more than just a TV, doubling up as a space for widgets, notifications, or even as a faux fireplace!

The OLED Shelf is a winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award for the year 2022.

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This sustainable shelf requires no screws or tools to assemble

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Looks can be deceiving, they say, and what might be simple could actually be complicated in reality. A simple desk, for example, might be minimalist on the outside but is hiding complex mechanisms in its drawers. Then again, the most successful and effective simple designs are actually born from sophisticated thinking and, at times, nontrivial concepts and theories. This wooden shelf, for example, is so simple through and through to the point that you might even wonder how it is able to hold its parts together. Fortunately, it does work as advertised, creating a flat-packed piece of furniture that is sustainable at every point, from its creation to its transportation and even to its assembly.

Designer: Carlos Platz

The market is filled with minimalist wooden shelves that can be shipped in a flat-pack and assembled at home. After all, IKEA has become a household name, almost literally, and is overflowing with such pieces of furniture. Unless they are formed from a single piece of material, most furniture is held together using screws, glues, or even pieces of plastic. This creates complexity that is hidden behind simple facades, a complexity that sometimes eats away at the planet little by little as well.

Inspired by the simplicity of alpine joinery and architecture, this wooden shelf throws out all those conventions to arrive at a connection system that is genius in its simplicity. There are no extra parts or materials that join the shelves and the legs together other than the shelves and legs themselves. There isn’t even any kind of adhesive to give you confidence that the shelf won’t just fall apart once you put something heavy. Instead, the shelf relies on shapes and physical to keep everything in its proper place.

Named after the Italian word for “rotation,” Svolta shelving uses pieces of wood that have special cutouts that fit into each other tightly. The shelves have circular cutouts where the legs are supposed to go. The legs, however, aren’t perfectly round but are like wooden rods split in half. The idea is that you insert the legs into the shelves sideways and then rotate them so that the groves match the shelves. With this design, a three-layer shelf with six legs can supposedly be assembled by a single person in just two minutes.

Keeping the design simple has other benefits that go beyond ease of assembly. The furniture can be packed more tightly to reduce packaging waste, and they can be transported easily and more efficiently, further reducing carbon emissions from transporting products. The shelf can also be made from sustainable materials and processes, and Svolta itself is made from European oak and finished with eco-friendly colorless hard oil. Even better, it’s a system that can scale to other types and sizes of shelves, creating a new shelving system that is so simple yet elegant that it feels almost like magic.

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This odd metal shelf tries to preserve your work-life balance

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The boundaries between work and personal life have been blurring in the past few years, and recent work-from-home arrangements have only muddled the lines even further. As many people learned the hard way, it takes a good amount of mental discipline to separate the two when they’re working at home, but it’s not exactly impossible. Having a separate home office is ideal but isn’t always an option for those with limited space. In such cases, furniture can come to the rescue, creating a physical and visual boundary between different parts of your life. That’s exactly the kind of effect that this shelf is aiming for, creating a figurative and literal separation between work and rest, especially for those that tend to have their desks beside their bed.

Designer: Jeong Hyuk Kim

If you look at it head-on, this shelf looks almost stereotypical, with box-like spaces for items like books and a top surface for putting decorative items like plants and vases. Once you start viewing it from a different angle, though, you’ll immediately see how it’s not your conventional shelf, especially in the way its body seems to snake upward, creating another space on its back.

The Criteria shelf concept is actually a blending of two different types of shelves for different parts of the day. As mentioned, one is a typical shelf to store books, stationery, desk accessories, decor, and other items you might need for work. The opposite side of this shelf, however, also has a shelf but with more limited space. It also has lighting that would be more useful at night.

This is the “rest” part of Criteria’s functionality. While one side is designed for productivity, the other is designed as a temporary landing area for transit items like phones, books, watches, or glasses. In other words, it functions as a bedside night shelf, though its height might not be ideal for reaching out at night. The idea is to have a single piece of furniture serve two functions, depending on which side you’re facing. That only works, however, if both “faces” of the shelf are within arm’s reach in the first place.

The skeleton of the shelf is made from a single sheet of metal bent to achieve this crooked shape. The central column and the shelves themselves are attached through gaps in the body. To prevent the metal edges from injuring people, they are bent to curve downward, creating a bit of safety. The shelf has a built-in power socket and USB ports for charging devices and powering the night lamp, and the gap between the spine and the shelf’s frame creates a path for the power cable to pass through.

The Criteria shelf concept presents a rather interesting solution to the problem of keeping a work-life balance at home. Rather than having a single shelf where work and personal items mix indiscriminately, it has two distinct areas for work and for rest. It’s also most metaphorical in how it shows two sides of the same shelf as if reminding people that, at the end of the day, these separate sides are still part of the same person.

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Ledoux is a modular shelf system that lets you go crazy with organization

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We all arrange our things differently, and we have different criteria for what constitutes organized and tidy. Furniture makers, however, often have to design for a wider audience, so they have to compromise on features that will work for a general population. There are, of course, modular and customizable furniture that allow us to mix and match parts, but often within certain limitations. It would sound at first that a modular shelf would also have similar restrictions, but this rather quirky shelf is nothing like your typical wooden furniture. Just like its randomly-shaped shelves, Ledoux doesn’t stick to a fixed form and lets you be the one to decide how you want your room to look like, any day of the week.

Designers: Natalie Shook and Wes Rozen (Piscina)

All shelves have separate layers to hold objects. Some come with uniform distances between them, while others have seemingly random heights. Conventional shelves are enclosed in boxes, while there are some that are almost literally just a wooden skeleton. In almost all these cases, you have to make do with what you bought, and even modular shelves where you can add or remove parts could still be limited by size.

Piscina’s Ledoux breaks free from all those conventions and challenges the definition of a shelf. Yes, there are still “floors” where you can put stuff on, but each of those wooden doesn’t conform to the standard rectangular shape of shelves. Some are more circular; some are rectangular. Others defy definition in terms of your typical geometrical shapes. Best of all, you can put them at any height you wish and in any order, even if you have to leave out some of them.

At the literal center of this design is a wooden spine that definitely looks its part. The grooves in between each box of the column are the spaces where you can slot in any of those shelves. You can align them all in the middle, or you shift a few to the left or right. You can be as imaginative as you can be or as normal as you need to be. You don’t have to be locked into what you chose at first and rearrange everything on a whim. Presuming, of course, you’re willing to do the work of removing your stuff and putting them back again.

What’s even more interesting is that Ledoux can actually function as more than a shelf. Depending on the configuration, you can even use the lower part of the shelf as a desk with plenty of room above for important work materials and tools. It might not be as polished as a dedicated desk in terms of functionality, especially with the lack of drawers, but anyone owning this shelf is probably eccentric enough not to want a traditional desk anyway.

This kind of modular system is definitely interesting, even without the quirkiness of the shelves’ shapes. The freedom it affords by letting the owner decide exactly how shelves are set up can be liberating. Of course, it also gives them the freedom to stick to one style and never change the arrangement, but the furniture would still be an eye-catching fixture in any room, regardless.

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Spark furniture concept offers simple ways to tune your tables and shelves to your style

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It’s not easy to find furniture or products that perfectly fit our needs and our aesthetic tastes, not unless we buy bespoke editions or commission someone to make them for us. Once in a while, we do come across a table or a shelf that sings to us, but most of us have to settle for furniture that carries a generic design for mass production. We often end up personalizing these home pieces with photos, organizers, vases, decor, and other things that make them unique and different from others of the same design. What if you could actually customize a mass-produced desk or shelf easily without having to buy additional accessories? That is the idea behind Spray, and it delivers customization in a simple yet effective way that doesn’t take anything away from its minimalist beauty.

Designer: Pavel Vetrov

Admittedly, there are plenty of furniture these days that try to flaunt their minimalism and configurability. Sometimes, however, the system is only visually simple but inherently complex. Hidden mechanisms, detachable modules, and moving parts might be out of sight, but they also make the product more prone to wear and tear, not to mention making them harder to repair or replace. In contrast, almost every option is within plain sight with Spray, and nothing requires screws, hinges, or anything metal for that matter.

The desk, for example, offers a clean and open surface to work with, with no borders or hidden pockets other than a traditional drawer. There is a rail system on the back that does let you add certain functional pieces as you need. It’s all made of wood, so there are fewer chances of sliders getting unhinged or deformed. Although the concept already includes at least three of these “modules,” there’s plenty of room to add more if necessary, presuming they’re available.

Interchangeable parts for the desk include a box for holding pens or other small items, a book stand, and a circle that has a mirror on one side and a corkboard on the other. In addition to being functional, they also add visual accents to the desk, their brown hues complementing the table’s black surface quite nicely. You can mix and match and put them in any order or position you prefer. The book stand, for example, can be easily detached when you need to read something up close. And at the end of the day, all these parts can retreat to the back, leaving your desk space clean and tidy.

The Spray shelf uses the same rail concept but with a simpler, single groove in the front of each shelf. This is where wooden discs slide into place to add some variety to the furniture that is pretty much a simple wooden frame. These discs act as shields to hide things behind, and they can be positioned anywhere you like. They’re also entirely optional, in case you want to show everything you have on display.

Spray doesn’t do anything extraordinary to provide personalization options, and that is actually its biggest strength. It is simple, pure, minimalist, and beautiful, and it doesn’t let its flexibility get in the way. It’s definitely a refreshing take on a growing trend of products, both furniture and accessories, that start to go to the opposite extreme of becoming more complex in the name of flexibility.

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This asymmetrical wooden storage doubles as a beautiful side table

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Space isn’t infinite, at least not the ones inside our houses and our rooms. Every piece of furniture you add means less room for anything else. Given the premium on living spaces these days, people have been forced to be smarter about their purchasing choices, particularly when it comes to chairs, tables, and shelves. Sometimes people buy modular products they can shrink and grow as needed or storage they can shove in some unusual location like stairs. Most of the time, however, people pick designs that can serve two purposes at the same time, like this small shelf and storage space that can also be used as a low side table, even if it looks like it might tip over.

Designer: Deniz Aktay

Shelves are excellent for storing things and also displaying them at the same time. Depending on how you arranged those things, it might also be easy to retrieve them at a moment’s notice. Most shelves, however, take up a lot of space, can rarely be moved, and can’t be used for anything else. Having something that can serve multiple functions at once is definitely better, and that’s what Crossbred tries to offer on a slightly smaller scale.

The furniture’s name speaks to both its form as well as its function. It looks like an “X” or a cross, as some might call it, standing steadily on the tip of its two legs. It’s a hollow cross through and through, and all five spaces can be used to store anything from books to knickknacks. That said, given their inclined surfaces, it obviously isn’t a good idea to put something that requires a perfectly horizontal plane, like some fragile decor or even a picture frame.

One part of Crossbred, however, might be good for that. One of the cross’ top arms is chopped off, leaving a flat horizontal surface. This can be used for those objects, or it can be used as a table for a quick sip of coffee. Of course, it can be used for both, even at the same time. It’s that kind of flexibility that makes the design a more viable solution than a separate shelf and side table. Almost every nook and cranny of the storage can be used for something, like a marker for books or a holder for phones and stationery. Despite its unorthodox design, there is almost no wasted space here.

There is also a certain charm to the Crossbred’s design. Despite being made from wood that gives off a sense of warmth and familiarity, its cross shape and especially its truncated arm also give it a pinch of dynamism and whimsy. It definitely has an understated beauty to it, one that doesn’t scream to get attention. Most importantly, it is multi-functional and a perfect fit in today’s world and lifestyles, where change is constant, and people’s needs and tastes change just as much.

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