We’re putting this image into our ever-growing file of shelving ideas. A chain is a fine solution for when you don’t have an end wall to hold up a wooden shelf. You get the support without the feeling of the space being blocked or hemmed in. Simple and ingenious. We can imagine interpreting it in a more modern idiom, using cables and clean-cut or painted boards, though this mash-up of materials is pretty swell.

Then we saw Outofstock‘s shelving unit based on a suspension bridge and began to imagine a thin steel support that could be fabricated, the ends bent at angles that would allow you to afix it securely to shelf and ceiling or wall…

We’re always inventing in our heads.

top via Style Files; bottom via Design Milk