Tag Archives: sideboard

When Your Sideboard Swallows Your Books (On Purpose)

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Most furniture does exactly what it promises. A shelf holds things. A table provides surface. A sideboard stores what you don’t want to look at. Deniz Aktay, a Stuttgart-based designer, seems to find that level of literalism a little boring.

His latest piece, the “Slot” Sideboard, is a sleek metal sideboard that does something I haven’t seen before: it swallows your books whole. Or nearly whole. The top surface features book-shaped cutouts, slots sized just right to accept a few volumes that then slide partway through, hovering suspended between the top of the sideboard and the interior shelf below. Spines tilted at an angle, partially disappearing into the furniture itself, the books aren’t hidden. They’re put on stage.

Designer: Deniz Aktay

The visual effect is genuinely arresting. From straight on, it looks like the books are simply leaning through the sideboard, defying the expected logic of furniture. The steel body, finished in a dusty blue-grey, stays completely clean and minimal, which only makes the books pop harder. They become the focal point. The design knows this and leans into it.

Aktay trained as an architect at the University of Stuttgart before founding his own design studio, DEZIN, in 2020. You can feel the architectural thinking in the Slot Sideboard. The slots aren’t decoration. They are a structural decision that reorganizes how the object functions. By cutting through the plane of the top surface, Aktay collapses the boundary between storage and display. The books don’t live behind a door or on top of the piece as an afterthought. They are literally built into its architecture.

This matters more than it might seem. One of the persistent design problems with books is exactly this tension: do you store them, or do you show them? Traditional bookshelves say store, with display as a side effect. Coffee table styling says display, with access sacrificed. The Slot Sideboard says both, simultaneously, and solves the problem by making books a structural element rather than an accessory.

I appreciate that the piece doesn’t shout about this. It’s not a novelty object with an obvious gimmick printed on the side. At rest, without books, the sideboard is clean and almost brutally minimal, the stepped slot openings looking like an architectural section drawing. Add a few books, and the whole thing shifts register. It becomes warmer, more personal, more lived-in. That kind of dual identity in a single object is hard to pull off.

Aktay’s philosophy centers on finding the right balance between proportion, material, and functionality. The Slot Sideboard is a good example of that balance working. The proportions are long and low, giving the piece the kind of horizontal calm that makes a room feel settled. The metal construction is precise without feeling cold. And the function is genuinely expanded by the design, not just dressed up.

The one thing I keep thinking about is the practical question of how many books actually fit, and at what angle. The promotional images show a small cluster, maybe three or four volumes, tilted together in the slot. It reads beautifully. Whether it reads the same with a thicker, heavier hardback, or with books of wildly different heights, is a detail that a real-world test would answer. That’s not a criticism so much as natural curiosity. Good design always makes you want to live with it.

The broader trend here is worth noting. Furniture design has been slowly, quietly moving away from pure storage and toward what you might call narrative objects, pieces that make a room tell a story. The Slot Sideboard fits into that movement while having its own specific logic. It isn’t just pretty. It has a point of view about what books are for and where they belong. They belong where people can see them. Where they’re part of the room. Not filed away. Whether or not Aktay set out to make a statement about books and visibility, the piece makes one. And it makes it beautifully.

The post When Your Sideboard Swallows Your Books (On Purpose) first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Sideboard That Started as Lines That Never Finished

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Most great furniture doesn’t start with a grand vision. It starts with a sketch, usually a messy one, the kind you draw absentmindedly while thinking about something else entirely. Designer Deniz Aktay knows this. His latest piece, the Shift Sideboard, is proof that an unfinished line can sometimes carry more intention than a polished one.

The concept is deceptively simple. Aktay began with a sketch of shifted, incomplete lines, the kind of drawing that would normally get torn out and tossed. But he saw something worth keeping in that incompleteness: a structural idea where two horizontal planes don’t fully align, each one sliding past the other, leaving gaps and openings that feel both accidental and entirely deliberate. That tension between intentional and incidental is what makes the Shift so visually compelling.

Designer: Deniz Aktay

Looking at it from the front, the sideboard reads almost like a typographic letterform. The upper shelf sits shorter, pulled to one side, while the lower platform stretches past it in the opposite direction. The result is a silhouette that feels like it’s mid-motion, caught between two states. It doesn’t try to be symmetrical, and that’s exactly why it works. Symmetry in furniture is safe. This is not that.

From a practical standpoint, those offset gaps aren’t just aesthetic choices. They translate into genuinely useful storage zones. Books stand upright in the open left compartment without needing bookends. A phone charges through a slot in the side wall, with the cable routed out cleanly through the offset gap at the edge, no cable box, no ugly workaround, no strip of tape pretending the cord isn’t there. For anyone who has ever stared at a tangled mess of cables on a media console and felt low-level irritation about it, this is the kind of thoughtful detail that earns real appreciation.

The material choice reinforces the whole mood of the piece. The warm, pale oak tones photograph beautifully against neutral backgrounds, and I imagine they read even better in a real room. There’s a quietness to it. The grain runs consistently across every surface, and the joinery is clean without being precious. It doesn’t have the cold austerity that some minimalist furniture falls into, the kind where you’re afraid to actually put anything on it. The Shift looks like it wants to be used, which is actually a harder thing to achieve than it sounds.

Aktay has been building a following for this kind of work for a while now, and he’s clearly found an audience that’s hungry for furniture that sits somewhere between concept and craft, pieces that look like they belong in a gallery but function like they belong in a home. His earlier work already hinted at this ability to make structure feel expressive without becoming theatrical. The Shift continues in that direction, but with more restraint. It feels more resolved.

My personal read on it: furniture that earns attention through subtlety is almost always more interesting than furniture that shouts. The Shift doesn’t need to be dramatic. The offset lines do the work quietly, and you keep noticing new things about it the longer you look. The way the shadow falls differently on each side. The way the open compartment frames whatever you put inside it. The way the cable route makes a modern inconvenience feel like it was part of the design from the beginning, because it was.

That last part matters more than it gets credit for. Cable management is often an afterthought, tacked on at the end of a design process with a grommeted hole and a prayer. Building it into the structure itself, as a consequence of the form rather than a patch over it, is the kind of decision that separates a design exercise from something you’d actually want to live with. The Shift Sideboard started as an unfinished sketch. Right now, at least conceptually, it feels very finished indeed.

The post The Sideboard That Started as Lines That Never Finished first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Sideboard Has Lapis Lazuli and Green Onyx Hand-Set Into Marble

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Black Marquina marble tends to command a room before anything else in it does. The material has a particular gravity, that deep, carbonized base cut through with white veining, which makes most furniture around it feel like an afterthought. Designer Himanshu Kumar Gupta leans into that authority completely with the Midnight Inlay Sideboard, then quietly subverts it the moment someone opens a door.

The exterior runs on strict formal logic. Vertical fluting covers the door panels from edge to edge, each ridge precisely cut into the stone so the surface ripples with shadow even under flat ambient light. On plain marble, this treatment would read as architectural severity, which is exactly the point. The fluting establishes a rhythm, almost like a grid, that makes what comes next feel genuinely disruptive.

Designer: Himanshu Gupta

Scattered across those ridged panels are rectangular inlays in Lapis Lazuli, Red Fire marble, Alikanta, and Green Onyx, appearing at irregular intervals and orientations like signals caught mid-transmission. Each inlay sits flush within the fluting, which means the stone was routed and fitted with zero tolerance for error. A slightly proud or recessed block would break the silhouette entirely. That constraint alone separates this from surface-applied decoration.

The interior is where the piece earns its sharpest contrast. Behind the cool, textured stone exterior is a cavity lined in red velvet over solid wood, a warm, almost theatrical shift in material register. Opening the doors feels less like accessing storage and more like discovering that a severe stone cabinet had a completely different personality waiting inside, the kind of detail that does not photograph well and cannot be fully appreciated without direct interaction.

Cylindrical handles in a warm copper-toned metallic finish sit vertically in the fluting, restrained enough to avoid competing with the inlays. The base is a solid slab, no tapered legs, no gap between cabinet and floor, keeping the profile ground-hugging and monolithic. The overall silhouette is low and horizontal, which helps it read as furniture rather than architecture, even with the stone’s commanding presence working against that reading.

Combining five different natural stones into a single fluted facade is a nontrivial production problem. Stone inlay of this precision typically requires hand-fitting each piece individually, since natural stone does not behave with the consistency of milled engineered material. The designer frames this as a contemporary take on traditional inlay craft, creating a beautiful tension between order and spontaneity, old and new.

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This Oak Sideboard Has Doors You Can’t Stop Touching

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You know that feeling when you run your fingers across something and the texture makes you stop in your tracks? That’s exactly the vibe British furniture maker Nick James is going for with his sideboard featuring sculpted doors. And honestly, it’s the kind of piece that makes you rethink what furniture can be.

At first glance, it looks like a solid oak sideboard. Clean lines, classic proportions, nothing too flashy. But then you get closer and realize those doors aren’t just doors. They’re carved with flowing, wave-like patterns that transform the flat surface into something that feels almost alive. The sculpting reveals the oak’s grain in ways you’d never see otherwise, creating shadows and depth that shift as you move around the piece.

Designer: Nick James

This isn’t Nick James’s first dance with texture. The British designer has built a reputation for bringing tactile interest to traditional furniture forms. His approach is about celebrating the material itself, letting the wood grain become the star of the show rather than hiding it under layers of paint or veneer. In a world where so much furniture feels mass-produced and anonymous, there’s something refreshing about a piece that proudly shows off its origins.

The sideboard itself is practical in all the ways you’d want. It measures a generous size, perfect for dining room storage or as a living room statement piece. Inside, you’ll find a height-adjustable shelf, so whether you’re storing wine bottles or board games, you can configure it to fit your life. The hardware is minimal, keeping the focus on those sculptural doors that really deserve center stage.

What makes this piece particularly interesting is how it straddles different design worlds. There’s a mid-century modern sensibility to the proportions and the floating quality of the case. But the textured doors feel almost Art Deco, with their geometric repetition and emphasis on craftsmanship. And then there’s an undeniably contemporary edge to the whole thing, because let’s face it, most traditional furniture makers aren’t carving wave patterns into cabinet doors.

The price point sits at £2,950, which puts it firmly in the investment furniture category. But here’s the thing about pieces like this: they’re made to order from solid oak, hand-finished, and designed to last decades. In an era when we’re all supposed to be buying less but buying better, a sideboard like this makes the case for choosing quality over quantity. Plus, it’s the kind of furniture that only gets better with age as the oak develops its patina and character.

Some design purists might argue about the use of CNC technology to create the repetitive carved pattern. There was even a comment on Core77 suggesting that precision CNC texturing lacks soul. But I’d push back on that. The technology is just a tool, like a chisel or a lathe. What matters is the design vision behind it and the quality of execution. James uses the precision to reveal something beautiful about the material itself, not to disguise it as something it’s not.

The sideboard also speaks to a broader trend we’re seeing in contemporary design: texture is having a major moment. Whether it’s fluted glass, ribbed wood, scalloped tiles, or carved surfaces, designers are moving away from the ultra-minimalist smooth finishes that dominated the 2010s. People want furniture that invites touch, that creates visual interest through shadow and form, that makes you want to get up close and really look.

What I love most about this piece is that it doesn’t shout for attention. It’s not trying to be the loudest thing in the room. Instead, it rewards the people who take time to notice the details. The way the light catches the carved surface. How the grain pattern emerges from the sculpting. The contrast between the textured doors and the smooth frame. These are the kinds of subtle pleasures that make living with good design so satisfying.

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