Custom Furniture: Shelving

Over the last year, I’ve worked on a few projects that involved creating custom pieces for clients from the ground up. I have two main reasons that I love working on custom pieces:

1. Happy homeowners having the exact right piece for their space

2. The sheer delight I get when I see the finished product that at one point existed only as an image in my brain

One of the first pieces I worked on, was actually for myself. The problem was that our entry closet didn’t have good enough storage for our shoes. I looked at off-the-shelf solutions at a variety of stores but nothing was quite right in terms of fit, design and storage capacity. I designed the shelf to fit exactly into the closet, but to still be its own piece of furniture. In order to achieve this, it is actually two pieces. The height and depth is built around IKEA’s SKUBB shoe boxes which is the perfect way to protect the shoes while still being able to see which one is in which box. The length doesn’t fit in an exact amount precisely, but the approximately 5” gaps are perfect for sliding in umbrellas, shoe polish, leather protector, etc.

Here is the final design:

Here’s the final product: (Colour: Night Club by Behr)

This next shelving unit, unfortunately, ended up not being built. But I had too much fun getting it to the final design specifications to not share it. The purpose for this floating shelving unit was mainly to store a large record and CD collection, but also to be visually appealing and allow for additional display space. When I presented the initial design concept to the homeowners, we had a few “inspiration” images and one in particular stood out which became the jumping off point for the final design. The design presented a few challenges, particularly ensuring that the shelving could hold not only the amount of records and cd’s required but also the weight of those items.

Here is the design:

Here is a rendering of how the design would look when integrated into the overall concept for the space:

Both of these shelving units were simple in terms of their overall design and also affordable for being purpose built pieces.  

If you could integrate a custom piece into your space, what would it be?