Friday, October 23, 2009

Electronics Fashion Pushing Furniture Design

Everyone who makes furniture has at one time or another been asked to make something that holds electronic equipment. When I was growing up in the sixties, electronics came with their own very cool cabinets -- like the MagnaVox stereo system in my parents' house: a record player and speakers housed in a dark, ornate case the size of a minivan.


But sometime in the eighties people decided that they wanted to hide their electronics in furniture that didn't look like it had any electronics in it. So in that decade I designed and built a lot of pieces that held electronics, including the relatively small TV's then in fashion. Here's a television hiding in Shaker garb:




But as we Americans grew larger, so too our televisions. In the nineties large picture-tube TV's became the electronic rage, so we furniture makers responded with armoires that were big enough to shoehorn in these increasingly massive units. Here's an armoire I made in 1996, with a 250-pound television hiding demurely behind the center doors:



But as furniture people like to say, the tables have turned. With the advent of sleek flat screen TV's, people are no longer ashamed to have their televisions in plain sight with its tacit admission that you actually watch it. But you can't just plop these elegant glass and plastic sculptures on the floor -- you need something to support them at the proper elevation. And thus we have the birth of a new kind of low console, that not only puts your TV at a comfortable height for viewing, but holds all the associated paraphernalia: cable boxes, DVD players, remote controls, discs, etc. Here's one I made last month:



So I suppose we'll be building these for twenty years or so until people think having a flat screen in open view is declasse. I foresee the advent of very wide, and very thin, cabinets.

1 Comments:

Blogger OSr Group said...

Amazing transformation! Good job!
Veneer Manufacturer in India, flush door Manufacturer in India


May 12, 2014 at 2:09 AM  

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home