Category: Shelf

KINK

Osko+Deichmann, the product design studio founded by Blasius Osko and Oliver Deichmann, created a minimalist family of tubular steel furniture named “KINK”. While normally tubing used in furniture is bent the Berlin design duo rather functionally folded, dented and kinked the tubes in their furniture pieces. The traces that come with the steel process are now integral to the furniture’s design.

The family consists of a table, chair, writing table, cantilever chair, sideboard, shelf, coffee table and floor lamp made exclusively of tubular steel, pine wood and clamps.

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Revolver

I love the simplicity of Revolver – a display and storage system based on a reversible shelf design. Revolver is made by the London based design studio Henny van Nistelrooy. Van Nistelrooy, 1979 – The Netherlands, founded his studio after his graduation in 2007.

Revolver was developed as part of the retail design commission for Velorution – a London based bicycle store. The shelving system is very flexible and perfect to exhibit objects and garments. The combination of the wood (Douglas fir) and powder coated sheet metal works fine and give the system a subtle elegance.

One can easily adjust the system by hooking one shelf above the other.

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Shelf System A

Beautiful and minimal shelf system developed by artist Liam Gillick.

Throughout modern history, artists and architects have created their own furniture, or appropriated industrial objects, to satisfy their own needs and to demonstrate their vision for an improved way of life.

The work of Liam Gillick breaks through the genre- and media-specific boundaries of the visual arts. He undertakes architectural and structural, spatial interventions as well as creates minimalist objects.

Shelf System A is made of six powder-coated aluminum elements to be mounted onto the wall, three different color combinations. Produced by Schellmann Studio, limited to an edition of 100.

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QueB

QueB is the first furniture piece from the young Belgian design collective FARZ, consisting of Anton Boel, Bart Houben and Pieter Neyens.

The simplicity in the design of QueB is strongly reflected in the material – one steel rail and three steel cubes. Simplicity is also found in its flexibility. The boxes can be easily positioned in multiple ways depending on one’s own preference or mood. The rail is tied to the wall in such a way that the screws are invisible, introducing a minimalist aesthetic to the design.

For me, the most successful aspect to this rack is the continual visual interest it can create from one moment to the next by making slight adjustments to the box positions.

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Dancing Squares

Distinguished Japanese design agency Nendo have created the Dancing Squares collection consisting of a series of minimalist furniture pieces based on the concept of motion.

Nendo describes some of the designs:

One part of the bookshelf is frozen in a tumbling cascade, creating variety in the way books can be stacked. The stool’s twist endows it with rich visual play. Lamps roll about but are stable, thanks to their planes, and cast light in many directions. The table leans as though falling away, but maintains its function as a table, and makes objects placed on it seem to sink into its folds and sways.

The sense of motion, or rather dance is achieved through the clever positioning of the planes, resulting in a combating balance. My personal favourite would have to be the square open basket.

Nendo have also recently introduced the Dancing Squares collection to the NTCRI exhibition in Taiwan as a combination piece.

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Shelframe

A beautiful, simple idea, executed with so much care: Shelframe, by London-based designer Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad.

He writes:

The shelves are designed to occupy a space normally reserved for a framed picture or painting, and they act so as to frame compositions of everyday objects.

Please note how the cable starts in the center of the sides, to avoid tilting. And those little balls at the end of the cables… The whole design speaks purity and care. I like that very much.

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60s 606 is 50

In 1960, when he was just 28, Dieter Rams designed the 606 Universal Shelving System for Vitsoe. Their New York store is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary in the form of an exhibition called 60s 606 is 50.

In Dwell’s interview with Dieter Rams and Vitsoe’s managing director Mark Adams, Rams described the product by saying:

Never forget that a good product should be like a good English butler. They’re there for you when you need them, but in the background at all other times. Besides a few millionaires in London, most of us don’t have butlers.

The butlers of today are our products and our furniture.

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Hook

French architect Jean Nouvel’s Hook wall is a minimalist storage surface. It is also a new and interesting way to animate home or office walls.

Nouvel had been inspired by computer punch cards and sheet music staves when he designed this wall system for Italian brand Methis.

The system comprises metal strips with hidden joints, shelves and containers can be hung from gaps between the strips.

Jean Nouvel says:

A metal architecture, like a quotation from Jean Prouvé’s work: rather than a wall this is a continuous building system that encloses joints into the metal folds. And its corrugated skin, regularly perforated and lacquered, turns into a wall. A wall to capture light and liven up the space around it.

I love it as the wall turns into a complete device with infinite potential…

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Foundation

London-based designer Benjamin Hubert created Foundation, a shelving system inspired by brutalist architecture. The brutalist architecture style flourished from 1950s until 1975 and spawned from the modernist architectural movement.

Just like the characteristic of this style, Foundation has striking repetitive angular geometries. You can also see the influence in the contrast between the industrial materials like the Valchromat shelves (organic coloured wood fibre panels derived from forest waste), the steel metal boxes, and the soft and smooth leather tabs on those boxes.

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Shellf

Prompted by our recent post on single-drawer Less Stuff, Belgian industrial designer Pieterjan Deblauwe sent in this prototype he made a fw years back.

If you’re a bit like me, your first response will probably something like ’Okay, a shelf, yeah, so?‘ In that case I suggest that you read the next line and then quickly click on through to the rest of the images.

What you are looking at here is Shellf: a bedside table to hide your little secrets. The designer says this:

Objects take volumes out of the space which surrounds you. Here the idea is to use the space which is taken by the object.

Pretty smart!

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