"Designer" is usually a price tier. Here are ten checks that turn it back into something you can actually look at.
On most furniture sites, "designer" describes the photograph rather than the object. Good lighting, a plant, a stack of art books, and a price that assumes you will not ask what the word was supposed to mean.
There is an actual test. In the 1970s Dieter Rams — then head of design at Braun — wrote down ten principles as a way of asking himself whether his own work was any good. They have been in general circulation ever since, and they are the closest thing this trade has to a shared standard.
Two things you should know before we use them. The first is that Rams designed the Vitsœ 606, which is the shelving system every other shelving system is measured against. Grading our own product with his list is therefore a little rich, and we are aware of it. The second follows from the first: a list like this is only worth anything if it can fail you. So we have written each principle as something to look for on any wall shelving, ours included, and we have marked the two we cannot pass yet.
Run it on us. Then go and run it on whatever else is open in another tab.
1. Good design is innovative
Where to look: count what the maker invented, and then count what they left alone. A system that has re-invented every part usually did it to lock you in, and a system that invented nothing is a catalogue assembled from a supplier's pages. What you want is evidence that someone identified the two or three places where the existing answer was actually deficient.
Ours hangs from a wall track, which is not our idea and is not new. What we changed is on either side of it. The Hangtrack is 12-gauge and drilled on a 1 in pitch, so the whole system needs one row of screws and the fixings land where your studs are rather than where the track would prefer them. The standard is stepped where it crosses the track, so it lies flat against the wall instead of standing proud of it. The shelf is two parts rather than one, a thin plank on a deep cantilever, which is what lets the visible section stay slender under load.
And the thing we deliberately did not touch: the slot pattern is the common industry one, not a proprietary variant. That is principle 10 arriving early, and it cost us a lock-in we did not want.
2. Good design makes a product useful
Where to look: find a unique feature that enhances function. On a vernacular object like a shelf, it's very difficult to add a design feature that doesn't seem gratuitous. For our system, we have gone over the vernacular with a fine-toothed comb and added and subtracted carefully to enhance function. We've added more holes to the hangtrack to accommodate wonky stud placement. We've subtracted folds from the hangtrack by adding sheet metal thickness to clean up the design. We've added thickness to the shelf cantilevers to reduce their vertical size and enhance their edge-on appearance. We've subtracted thickness from the shelf plank to make them lighter to handle and ship. Our edits remind us of Oscar Wilde's account of a morning spent taking a comma out of a poem and an afternoon spent putting it back.
3. Good design is aesthetic
Where to look: at a loaded shelf, in a real room, never at an empty one in a studio. Nearly every aesthetic decision in shelving only becomes visible the day there are books or other content on it.
We have tried to keep the vocabulary of the system to two shapes — one horizontal, one vertical, flat or columnar, with as little smearing between the two as we could manage. Whether that reads as beautiful in your room is your call and not ours, and the five specific details that decide it are a post of their own.
Anyone claiming an objective pass on this principle is selling you their taste as a specification.
4. Good design makes a product understandable
This is the principle almost nobody applies to furniture, and it is the one we would most like you to use.
Where to look: can you tell how it works by looking at it, and could you predict what would happen if you changed something? Concealed fixings and hidden structure are usually sold as refinement. They are also a way of making sure you can never modify, extend or repair the thing without the manufacturer.
Nothing on ours is concealed. You can see what carries the load and what holds position, and because you assemble it yourself, you end up understanding the system whether you meant to or not. That understanding is the actual product for a lot of our customers: once you know how a track, a standard and a cantilever relate, you can look at any wall in your home and see what it would take.
What it costs: we demand that understanding rather than offering it. There is no showroom, no configuration appointment and nobody coming to your flat with a tape measure. If you would rather not think about your wall, that is a legitimate preference and we are the wrong system for it.
5. Good design is unobtrusive
Where to look: how much of the wall is structure, and how much of the structure is talking to you? Shelving is a tool, and a tool that keeps announcing itself is a decoration with a job attached.
There are no vertical panels in ours unless you want one. Everything horizontal is a working surface, the only verticals are the standards at 24 or 36 in intervals, and the wall of your own room runs continuously behind everything else. That argument — that the system barely has a boundary at all — is worked through here.
Honestly: we are not the least obtrusive thing you can hang. A wire system you can see the wall through is visually lighter than folded steel and always will be. What we would claim is the quietest version of a system that can take 165 lb and hold a straight line.
6. Good design is honest
Rams meant something more pointed than most people quote him as meaning. Honesty here is about claims — a design should not make a product appear more innovative, capable or valuable than it really is.
The first place to look is the material itself. Ours is steel, which is a material you already understand — you know what it does when it is loaded, dropped, scratched or left in a damp garage. Some of what turns up in furniture now, carbon composites and glass-filled nylons, behaves in ways that are not intuitive from looking, and their failure modes are not the ones your hands expect. That is not a rule against them. It is a reason to want the data sheet when they appear, and you rarely get it.
7. Good design is long-lasting
Rams' point was about fashion — a design that was never of its moment cannot go out of date. Durability is the second reading, and both matter here.
On the physical side: steel that stays coated and dry does not have a service life in any sense that affects you. Chips and scratches are the real question, and there are two answers, both honest. Powder coating is a common trade in most American cities, so a shelf can be re-coated locally for less than replacing it. Or you let the marks accumulate as patina, which is what most people do with a steel object and what the finish is intended to survive.
On the other side of longevity, the system is adjustable, so it adapts as what you own changes, and it is modular, so it can move house in pieces and come back together in a different arrangement.
This is one of the two principles we cannot yet pass, and we should say so plainly. The only proof of long-lasting is time, and the 606 has sixty-five years of it. We have months. That gap is real and no amount of gauge will close it.
8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail
Where to look: at the details nobody photographs. The end of a run. What happens where a shelf meets a standard. Whether the cut edge you will run your hand along has been folded or left raw. The parts of a product that are photographed always get attention; the ones that are not are where you find out whether somebody was actually paying attention.
Every part of this system was drawn for this system — nothing was chosen from a hardware supplier's catalogue and worked around, wall fasteners aside. That was not for its own sake. It is the only way to make the small decisions consistent with each other, and it is why we can say the tall cantilever doubles as a bookend and the front edge is a closed hem rather than a cut edge, instead of explaining why two bought-in parts do not quite agree.
And the honest position on this principle: if there is a detail we have missed, it is because we did not notice it. We would genuinely like to be told. A system that is still on its first decade has revisions ahead of it, and the people who find the missing details are the ones living with the thing.
9. Good design is environmentally friendly
Where to look: at the material, at the coating chemistry, and — far more important than either — at whether the object is going to be replaced.
Steel does well on all three. It is recyclable without downgrading, and a large share of what is produced is already recycled — steel is the most recycled material there is. The parts are rectilinear, which means modern nesting software packs them tightly on a sheet to minimize off-cuts and waste; organic shapes leave gaps that nothing can use. Powder coating is a dry process with no solvents and no VOCs, unlike wet paint, and on a dedicated line the overspray can be reclaimed rather than thrown away.
The counterweights, since this is the principle where everyone's copy gets vague. Steel is heavy, and weight is the environmental cost of shipping it — a parcel of shelving has a real footprint and we are not going to pretend otherwise though we have done our best to keep the weight where it's needed. Curing ovens use energy. And whatever is left over from nesting is still offcut, even if it goes back for recycling.
The largest lever by far is the last one: a shelf that gets adjusted, moved and re-coated over thirty years beats any material argument about a shelf that gets replaced twice in ten.
10. Good design is as little design as possible
The last principle is the one that catches most products, and it is worth reading as a warning rather than a compliment.
Where to look: what did they leave alone? A maker who redraws an established interface for the sake of having their own version has added design, not removed it — and you will pay for it later, when you need a part.
We took the existing wall-track vernacular and intervened as little as we could. We did not invent our own mounting system to prove we could rethink it, and we kept the industry slot pattern instead of drawing a proprietary one, which means the system will accept parts we did not make.
The tension with principle 1 is the actual job. Innovate too little and you have assembled a catalogue; innovate everywhere and you have built a walled garden and called it design. The work is deciding which two or three things genuinely deserved a new answer, and then having the discipline to leave the rest.
What this costs
A rubric is not a verdict. Any brand can publish a list like this and claim ten out of ten, which is precisely why the list is only useful if you run it yourself, on the product, rather than reading somebody's report card.
We fail principle 7 on the only evidence that counts. Time. Ask us again in 2050.
Principle 3 is taste, and there is no version of that sentence where we get to be the judge.
And principle 9 has one claim in it we would like to be able to show you rather than assert — the reclaim rate on our own coating. That is a photograph and a number we do not have yet, which puts it in the same bucket as the load test we owe you.
Five questions for any shelving that calls itself designed
- What did they invent, and what did they leave alone? Both answers should be short. If everything is proprietary, ask what happens when you need one more shelf in six years.
- Can you see how it works? If the fixings and the structure are hidden, you are being asked to trust rather than to understand — and you will not be able to modify or repair it without going back to them.
- Are there numbers on the page? A gauge, a load rating, a finish specification. Not "solid steel construction." A maker who has done the engineering publishes the engineering.
- Look at the details nobody photographs. The end of the run, the cut edges, the join. That is where thoroughness either exists or doesn't.
- Will it still be right in this room when the room changes? Adjustability, modularity and the ability to be re-finished are the environmental argument and the longevity argument at the same time.
The parts this post describes: the Shelf Standards at $49, shipped as two usable 42.5 in halves; the Shelves from $84.99 in 24 and 36 in widths and 8, 12 and 16 in depths, adjustable on a 1.25 in pitch without tools; and the 12-gauge Hangtrack from $35. Desh Home is in Atlanta. Why a system built to this brief is not priced like the European ones: the price of an idea.
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