Low Cherry Tansu – Design

In the last post about tabi-dansu, I mentioned that I was in the process of designing and building a small cabinet inspired by tabi-dansu. In this post I thought I’d shared the initial designs and concepts that I’ve created for that project.

Concept

My rough idea for this whole project was to explore the design and functional possibilities of stacking and arranging small tansu. One potential benefit that I see for living with this kind of system is the ability to add small cabinets as your storage needs develop, and in the process simply stacking and arranging the cabinets as needed, creating usable space as well as interesting arrangements. My wife and I currently have a small selection of little tabi-dansu, but their interior storage space is limited. So I wanted to create a cabinet that could serve as a base for a couple of our tabi-dansu, while also providing storage for bulkier items, and in the process play around with this concept a bit.

While designing this cabinet I spent a fair amount of time learning how to use Blender, a free 3D modelling program. Up until this point I have mainly used Sketchup for designing furniture projects, but the yearly subscription price for the pro version has been a big turn off for a while, and the limited features of the free web-based version of the app can often be annoying. Then last summer my wife introduced me to Blender and after seeing some of the really amazing designs and renders that people are making using the program I decided to spend some time learning how to use the program for furniture design. The learning curve is pretty steep, but for a free program it’s incredibly powerful and full of useful tools. The possibilities for what you can make with Blender are endless, and while furniture design may not be the most common use for the program it’s more than capable.

Thanks to the many amazing people on Youtube doing video tutorials I have managed to gain enough skill using the program to work out some basic images. (All of the images in this post were rendered in Blender). That said as you follow through the design process in this post hopefully you will be able to see the overall quality of the images improve a bit, along with the design of the cabinet itself, as I was learning to use Blender as I worked through this project.

Here is my rough initial concept, with the upper two tabi-dansu representing our current antique cabinets, along with the new cabinet on the bottom:

While I ended up making quite a few modifications to the design and concept images, the overall arrangement stayed the same. Visually I really like the asymmetrical look of the two tabi-dansu stacked on top, so I didn’t change that part of the design much. Instead I focused on the design of the lower cabinet particularly the door, drawers, and base.

Ken-don 倹飩 Doors

I thought about different ways to go about putting doors on the large half of the new cabinet and ultimately decided to create a single ken-don style door inspired by my tabi-dansu. Ken-don 倹飩 style doors sit in a groove cut into the top and bottom structure. The groove in the top is deeper, allowing the whole door to be lifted up into that groove which then frees the bottom edge of the door from the lower groove. Then the bottom of the door can be swung out and the whole door can be removed. If any readers are familiar with how shoji screens are installed, this is the same method. To open the door you simply grab hold of the two pieces of hardware attached to the door and lift the whole door up and out. It’s a really simple system.

Some alternative door options would have been to do two doors that hinge open, or two doors that slide, like on the other cherry tansu I built recently. The problem with two sliding doors is that access to the interior space will always be cut in half, since you can only ever fully open one side at a time. Hinged doors would have been fine, but ultimately I was interested in trying something new this time around.

Another part of the door design that came from our antique tabi-dansu was the simple mitered frame and panel construction. I really like the simplicity of the tabi-dansu’s panel which is flush with the surrounding frame. There’s no setback or ornamentation of any kind, instead the wood grain itself becomes the strongest feature, particularly where the panel’s vertical grain butts into the top and bottom frame pieces. I really like this design, but the construction method used on my tabi-dansu doesn’t leave any room for wood movement. So I designed the door for the new cabinet with a flush frame and panel, but left room for expansion on the sides. I also fit the panel to the frame using tongue and groove joinery.

Here is the next iteration of the design. The main difference here are the number of drawers on the lower cabinet. I drew variations with 2, 3 and 4 drawers. 3 drawers ended up looking the best, plus it worked out to give me the most useful drawer size for our situation.

Base Design

With the door style and drawers decided, the other area of the design that I found to be tricky was the base. When I first started designing the cabinet I drew everything sitting right on the ground. Essentially the way tabi-dansu are typically placed. I had been looking at our old tansu sitting flat on our floor for the past few years, so initially that’s where my mind was set. But eventually I started to think about how this cabinet will be used once we move back to the States, as well as the preferences of potential customers who may be interested in a similar cabinet. Also while tabi-dansu sit on the floor with no base, that style is pretty old-fashioned and nowadays here in Japan not a lot of people are using cabinets like that. If you look around at furniture stores or through magazines most of what you see are mid-century modern inspired cabinets that stand off the ground with legs.

So I started thinking about different base designs for the cabinet. Below is my first attempt, which is still pretty old-school. The design is more or less a straight up copy of the base on our large tansu that we are using as a dresser.

Overall the design is quite simple, with some subtle curved cutouts along the floor. Just enough to make it interesting without getting wild and crazy with adornment. Part of me really likes the look of this base, with it’s classical look. But I also wanted to see what the cabinet would look like with a more modern style base.

Here is one more iteration of the modern base. This time with the cabinet on it’s own. Since the whole cabinet is pretty boxy, I wanted to see what it would look like with a non-square element, so I added in round legs. It’s hard to look at your own work objectively when you are in the midst of creating or designing, and this base has become a good example of that. It’s easy to become lost in the myriad of possibilities, wondering what option is best. Overall I think I like the more modern style base best, but I’m unclear about going with the round or square legs. So I think I’m going to let the design stew for a bit and, maybe after giving it some time I’ll develop a stronger opinion about which direction to go.

Refining renderings in Blender

So at this point I was more or less satisfied with the overall design, but I continued to play around with creating images in Blender to see if I could get a more realistic representation of the overall concept. One tricky area is wood grain. There are lots of free wood textures available online and that is what I used on all of the above rendered images. But those textures are clearly often made by people with a limited understanding of wood grain, and they leave a lot to be desired. It does have the impression of being wood, and looks okay from a distance but when I started doing more close up images the quality of the texture was pretty bad. Then I found a way to create wood grain on my own, and started to attempt to make the overall image look a bit more natural. There’s still plenty of room for improvement, but overall the furniture has a much more natural wood look to it.

Another aspect of Blender that has been really fun to play around with is lighting. Good lighting is crucial to creating any good image and the possibilities to create and adjust different lighting and scenes within Blender are limitless. Aside from modelling and designing I think I’ve learned a massive amount about lighting for photography just by playing around with this program.

That’s about it for the design phase of this project. Thanks for following along, and stay tuned for the next post where I’ll share photos from the construction of the cabinet including hidden dovetail joinery on the main case.