Product news: Copenhagen designer Henriette W. Leth has designed a colourful, modular storage system for Danish design brand Normann Copenhagen.
Made of folded steel, the boxes are powder-coated in six different colours: white, grey, rose, rust, green and blue.
"I became tired of looking at unattractive book covers on the shelves and therefore decided to find a solution which could not only contribute with some color in the room but also be a way to store things practically," says Henriette W. Leth.
The Color Boxes are sold individually and can be stacked in any combination on the floor or hung on the wall separately.
The boxes can be placed on top of one another loosely, and the weight of the boxes and the contents inside keeps them in place.
Jan Andersen and Poul Madsen created Normann Copenhagen in 1999 in Copenhagen. We have featured other projects for Normann Copenhagen such as a folding whisk and a circular knife. See all of our stories about Normann Copenhagen.
We have also featured lots of other shelving systems on Dezeen, including a collection made from steel tubes, house-shaped frames and a robot-shaped bookcase. See all of our stories on shelving.
These modular boxes seem pretty for grey offices, but that fitting system looks very unstable to me.
Unattractive book covers! Find a new design challenge, love, this one’s not broken. Or buy some better books.
There seems to be no fitting system at all. Looks like if you put a book away while you’re angry, you’re gonna have a mess to clean up.
I must be missing something?
I agree with every comment made so far. I’m not sure I see the point of the designer claiming it has modular functionality if it becomes unsafe the second you start trying to play around with that aspect of it.
The idea of “disguising unattractive book covers” also becomes a moot point the moment you start trying to store books that aren’t the same colour as the box itself. There are actually few people who will own a pile of books which all uniformly come in rose pink, mint green, electric blue etc.
Yes, this is pretty to look at – but can a bookcase that fails to carry out the basic functionality of a bookcase (i.e. to store any manner (or colour!) of book without falling over when nudged slightly) really, honestly, be called one?