If you visit the apartment of a creative friend who works from home, you’ll probably see whatever project they’re currently working on all over their desk. Stacks of paper, sketches, Pantone books, fabric swatches. We live in a time where work and leisure hours have blurry boundaries, we multitask, and we let our projects all hang out, visitors be damned.
In the past it was different, of course; societal rules dictated you cleaned up your pig-sty if company was coming over, and work and leisure were two different things. A household task like sewing fell into the “work” category, it was meant to be focused on a few hours at a time and then put away. And furniture design of the time reflected that with some pretty neat design solutions.
Take the Mid-Century-Modern-looking table above, for instance. It appears an ordinary endtable, but as we shall see it has some surprising design features.
First off, what appears to be a drawer in the front, one that you’d assume occupied the same depth as the table, isn’t a drawer at all; it’s a flip-out panel containing small bins.
Next you might notice the odd, subtle bevel along the front edge, which it turns out is there to give your fingers purchase. The top surface turns out to be two layers of material, the top one liftable.
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