Impressive storage – for the everyday life
Impressive storage – for the everyday life
Storage furniture helps keep homes organized, from wardrobes and cupboards to bookshelves and cabinets. Designers like Grethe Meyer, and Børge Mogensen have shaped how people store their belongings. Iconic pieces like the String shelf, Ikea’s Billy, and Titti Fabiani’s BOOK show how storage design has evolved over time. This article explores the impact of these designs and their lasting influence.
A type category in the Museum’s digital archive’s filter is named ‘storage.’ That is quite a broad category in the field of contemporary design furniture. Nevertheless, it is one of the most essential. Just think about wardrobes, dressers, kitchen cupboards, bookshelves, and cabinets for all types of things, necessary and unnecessary.
The French architect Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999) once said: ”Without well-planned storage, it is impossible to find space in one’s home.” She worked together with Le Corbusier and his 1920s radical theories about the home as a machine. Perhaps she realized the big scheme’s lack of care for small details. The modernist architects’ vision was a home free from heavy, dark, and space-consuming furniture in rooms accessible for everyday life. Here, the pioneers struggled against deeply conservative traditions and strong commercial trends. It took a long time before the new radical ideas reached ordinary people.
In the 1950s, the architect Grethe Meyer (1918-2008) worked at the Danish Institute for Buildings Research. Together with her colleague Børge Mogensen (1914-1972), who is considered one of the ‘Big Danes,’ Meyer developed a storage series called Boligens Byggeskabe (eng. The Housing Cabinet). The series was based on deep and thorough studies and surveys of people´s daily activities, especially their storage needs. The furniture range became very wide and was measured to fit all kinds of storage needed in a modern Scandinavian home.
Another critical and successful invention was the String shelf, designed in 1949 by the married couple Kajsa Strinning (1922-2017) and Nils Strinning (1917-2006). Their shelf idea was awarded first prize in a design competition arranged by the Swedish publisher Bonniers, who wanted a simple and cheap self that was easy to deliver to their customers by mail order. The String shelf became a big sales success and still is after 75 years.
If you ask any Swede to name a bookshelf, they will likely say Billy. This shelf was designed, or should I say was measured up, in 1979 and is one of Ikea’s best-selling furniture of all time. Billy was a development of the earlier variant from 1967, named Tiga, which means quiet in Swedish. The catalog stated: “A real bookshelf, of course, contains books and nothing else.” This was a wink to the Swedish manufacturer Lundqvists Snickerier and their commercial tagline “The books should speak, the bookshelf be silent!”
In this context, I would also like to mention the “Spika bookshelf” designed in 1967 by architect Erik Karlström (1917-2005), launched by Swedish Coop’s furniture department stores. Spika (nail in English) was a kit made of untreated sawed-up chipboard to be nailed together by the customer into a practical bookshelf. Spika was perfect in the contemporary “do it yourself” trend, became immensely popular, and sold as many as 1,3 million copies.
The iconic square-shaped shelf BOOK, designed in 1969 by Italian designer Titti Fabiani (b.1939), has become a favorite among architects and designers worldwide. Its enduring appeal likely lies in its sleek yet meticulously crafted design. Legend has it that Fabiani created the shelf simply to organize her vast book collection at home. Reflecting on her work, she once said: “Architecture means strict rules. It’s nice breaking them.”
Titti Fabiani was just 30 years old when she got her big breakthrough. In the Italian Abitare design magazine, BOOK was presented in a major article as "a bookshelf for today, tomorrow and forever". And the harmony of the proportions, the strictly geometric shape, and the glazed doors' exclusivity struck. Simplicity and minimalism. A cube, nothing more– a straight line back to the Bauhaus geometric world. Titti Fabiani did not create the square – just created a unique way of using it.
Article written by Lars Bülow
