Murphy Shelves?

I spotted Sebastian Errazuriz’s “Piano” shelving yesterday, in the Cristina Grajales booth at the new Collective Design Fair in New York. It’s a truly clever concept: The separate bars (or “keys”) that make up the shelves can be pulled down as needed, depending on the objects than you want to display. Two thoughts, though: First, if the shelves were engineered without gaps they could be used for books, which is the most pressing, and ever-changing, shelving need for most of us (bars pulled half-way down could even act as bookends); second, as things stand, there’s a danger that such witty and attractive shelves could encourage knick-knacky tendencies in even the most restrained of us, infecting modern spareness with Victorian clutter. Just because you own something nice doesn’t mean you have to display it…

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