Design Challenge and Design Ideas

This suite of free standing furniture was designed for clothes storage for bedrooms within a Victorian terraced house. Fitted furniture was not suitable because this would diminish the clarity of the existing spaces. In addition the client requested that they would like to be able to take the furniture pieces with them if they were to move.

How the brief was fulfilled

The pieces are a family of sorts, formed around the routine of the bedroom and dressing. The pieces are freestanding objects eschewing the desire for built in furniture and instead try to form a suite of characterful objects around the ritual (weekly, daily and nightly) of dressing.

The pieces include a wardrobe, which one returns to weekly or every couple of days for jackets, shirts, dresses and trousers; a double undergarment drawer with hanging rail beneath which takes the place of a chair or often the floor for those items of clothing you want to wear again the following morning with drawers for socks and pants above; and a nightstand with removal laundry bag which functions as table as well as nightly disposal for clothing.

The pieces are assembled from 2 colours of Valchromat MDF reminiscent of the dark and blond timber of classic bedroom armoires The jointing is expressed so that the sheet pieces of the CNC cut Valchromat are emphasised acknowledging the process and the quality of the sheet material it is made of.

Handle pulls are routed into the MDF as overscaled geometric shapes as practical and decorative devices. The MDF is sealed with a low solids clear matt Rubio monocoat to protect while maintaining the original shelf appearance of the through-coloured MDF.