We recently stumbled on designer Olivier Dollé‘s very compelling room partition. Or that’s what we thought it was until we started wondering why he add the two horizontal pieces at the top and realized… they were LEGS!

It’s a table, turned on its side. Eureka!

Either way it’s great, and a testament to the practice of looking things on their side, upside down, inside out to get a new view…

Without the top horizontals, Dollé’s table-cum-wall feeds right into our obsession for cool room screens and partitions, which we love because they allow us to shift a big open space, in effect, using a partition out of hardwood scraps.

They remind us of other creations we’ve published using hardwood scraps and construction advisor Nina Saltman’s advice for how to handle them.

We’re thinking his essential pattern with its very modern “voids”  could be applied to furniture making using Nina’s technique. Gather some beautiful scraps, lay them out on a flat surface and start playing to make a pattern. (They can be of uniform width like Dollé’s to make a flat surface, or random widths to make a three-dimensional one, similar to the underside of the stool below.) Then start glueing and clamping. 

…Dollé’s given us new ideas for hardwood scraps…

…

And we’ve learned another way to make a room partition:  get a huge table and turn it on its side…