Mirror Shelf – Design

Since March of this year I’ve been working on creating a new furniture design every week using Blender. I’ve started to view the whole process as a digital sketchbook, to explore different ideas, some of which may never become a reality, and to work towards improving my skills when it comes to designing furniture. I realized I’ve spent years and years developing actual woodworking and carpentry skills, but kind of ignoring the fact that design is also a skill that needs to be developed.

It’s been a pretty productive stretch of time, chipping away for an hour at a time on a nearly daily basis. But occasionally I’ve had moments where I finish one design (or just set it aside for a bit) and feel completely lost as to what to work on next. In those moments I usually ask my wife what she thinks I should design, and one thing she was telling me to design repeatedly was a mirror.

So enter the mirror project.

When I started thinking about making a mirror, I knew pretty early on that I wanted to use a circular mirror. The problem with a circular mirror is how to make the frame. Making a perfectly round frame is a tricky task. I also thought a circular mirror and frame alone seemed somewhat plain, so I started to explore other options.

One of my first ideas was something like this. A round mirror with a frame that flowed around half the mirror and joined with a small cabinet.

Ultimately I abandoned the drawers pretty quickly, but I did really like the overall shape of the frame and mirror. One thing that I think works wells is having the mirror only partially framed out, creating a space between the mirror and lower shelf where the wall is exposed. I realize now after having spent some time with these designs, that what I like about this design is that the wall space becomes a part of the mirror. Rather than simply being a completely framed out and isolated piece hanging on the wall, the furniture becomes more integrated with the wall.

As much as I think the drawers are kind of cute, I thought it might be nice to simplify things a bit more. One of my personal goals when designing this piece was to make something that could be made relative easily to keep the overall price down, while not compromising on structural quality/joinery. And drawers, let alone the box they sit in, are a fair amount of work to make, even if they are small.

So I reduced things down to a simple shelf. Around this time I also started to think about how the mirror would actually hang on the wall, and played around with the idea of using a leather strap for hanging.

This design had a couple of issues. One was the leather strap. I really didn’t like the look of it, and pretty quickly abandoned it. The other issue was how to join the shelf to the frame. I didn’t draw it in Blender, but one idea I had was to do a simple dovetail on each end of the frame that would join to mating dovetails in the shelf. Dovetails would be plenty strong and would work in this situation, but I also wanted to explore some other options.

Which led to the next design using tusk tenons to lock the shelf in place.

This design moved things forward in the right direction. The change in joinery required extending both the shelf and the frame to allow adequate material for the ends of the frame to pass through the shelf. Those extensions look nice I think, though I’m not sure how to articulate why exactly. I think the extensions just add a bit of interest instead of a clean corner which in this case looked kind of boring to me.

Here’s a detail of the tenon and wedge joinery. While I think this joinery is really interesting, and allows the whole design to become completely demountable, the tenon itself has to be reduced in size in order to create a shoulder for the shelf to butt into. The tenon also has to be brought in from the back side (wall side) for the mating mortise in the shelf to be positioned far enough away from the back edge. Those reduced size tenon is subtle, but depicted in the image below.

Ultimately I think the shift in size between the tenon and the main frame kind of hurts the design. To my eye it would look cleaner if those parts were the same size, creating a more unified flow of the frame through the shelf. At this point I felt like the design was getting closer, but the joinery and issues related to the tenon still kind of bothered me. So I set the whole project aside for several weeks.

When I came back around to the design a few weeks later, I started playing around with a bunch of rough sketches to work out some ideas. Blender is great for visualizing things in a more realistic fashion, but sketching is such a great way to work out basic forms really quickly. For me sketching really starts to get ideas flowing. Sometimes it takes a while, but eventually one sketch/idea leads to the next and eventually ideas really start to snowball. At some point some of those sketches start to click somehow, and that’s when I start to develop things further.

One idea that came through in my sketches was to add layers of shelves similar in style to chigai-dana (違い棚) which are staggered shelves often seen adjacent to the alcove space in traditional homes here in Japan. You can see a set of chigai-dana on the right in the image below.

So back in Blender I started playing around with a few more designs, this time adding some more layers to the shelving. From the outset I had always planned for this project to be a wall hanging mirror, but one design that I played around a bit with was the floor standing mirror on the left. Granted this design still requires some additional supports/legs to allow it to stand on it’s own, I kind of like the look of it in the image below, with just two long legs reaching down to the floor. It has a kind of strange form, like a figure/person.

The design on the right above, and in detail below, is the design that I was convinced I would pursue after this second round of designing. The staggered shelves seemed nice, and I also liked having one shelf overlap the mirror, kind of tying those elements together. It’s subtle but one more change was to round out the frame, softening the edge that previously was sharp and square.

Thinking that this design was the way to go, I went so far as to make a bending form and start cutting wood. But Laying out the bending form for fabricating the frame was the first time that I actually drew the design full size, and it was a bit of a wake up call. Despite the realism you can get with Blender it still doesn’t reveal scale the way a full scale drawing does. Immediately the design felt too big. The mirror size itself, at 450 mm (~17.75″) diameter, is quite a decent size for practical use, but the multiple shelves added a lot to the height.

At that point, having already started the process of building the mirror, I had to really fight the urge to just forge ahead. Once you have some momentum and start building something it can be really hard to put on the brakes. But something really felt off after seeing the full scale drawing of the mirror. So back to the drawing board.

One more design iteration that I quickly abandoned was the following mirror. Here I kept the staggered shelves, but brought everything closer to the mirror itself in an attempt to shrink the size down a bit. I also played around with a more literal take on the chigai-dana, but the design felt like too much of a straight up imitation of Japanese woodwork.

Final Design

After looking through all the designs shared here, I started to realize that my original design with a single shelf had the best balance. I liked the overall form of the frame joined to a single shelf, but there was something lacking in the details. Rounding out the frame was one detail that I thought worked well on all of the later designs. But the shelf itself still lacked something. I liked the touch of asymmetry that the chigai-dana added to the otherwise static design, but by eliminating the staggered shelves that aspect disappeared. Then I started going through some images from the Finn Juhl exhibition that I mentioned in last weeks post, and was reminded of a detail that I saw on a couple of his benches and tables. That detail was an upturned edge running around the perimeter of the benchtop/tabletop (pictured here on his Cocktail Bench).

I like the design of that lip, and the feeling it gives to the overall design. It really turns the table into a container of sorts. Finn Juhl used that profile in combination with a cutout on the corners of his tables. I’m completely guessing but I imagine the cutout has a functional aspect, allowing a person to clean and wipe the table off more easily. But design-wise the cutout also really emphasizes the lip, by giving you a glimpse of the absence of it, and showing a cutaway profile.

So drawing straight from Finn Juhl’s design, I started to play around with some possibilities of profiling the edge of the shelf as well as a cutout. By hollowing and shaping the interior of the shelf, the shelf truly does become more of a container of sorts, and the cutout allowed me to play around with that little bit of asymmetry that I thought the design needed.

One final detail to mention is the joinery. Instead of the wedged tusk tenons, I opted to join the shelf and frame with a simple lap joint. That would allow me to keep the overall size and profile of the frame consistent, such that the frame would appear to just flow through the shelf.

And that was that. After toiling over the design of this seemingly simple mirror/shelf, I finally felt like I had arrived at something that I was excited to build. I’ve designed plenty of furniture where for one reason or another the design seems to just come together really quickly. This project wasn’t one of those. This took a lot longer to design and work out the details, but in the end I think it was worth it.

Stay tuned next week for some photos from the actual building process of this mirror. And thanks for reading.

-Jon