Excellence in Product Design — Part 3

In Part 1 of this series, I highlighted various tools that I store in my garage. In Part 2, I showcased various kitchen utensils that I’ve found very useful. In this article, I’ll discuss some storage features that my wife and I incorporated when we remodeled our house—features that have clearly made our home life easier and more enjoyable. Not everyone faces the kinds of challenges that we did—going to an open floor plan put some significant constraints on what we could do—but you may find use for many of the design elements and ideas I’ll discuss, regardless of your situation.

Blum Soft-Close Drawer Glides

I’ve seen various drawer guide designs, ranging from a simple central wooden rail to basic wheel-and-channel tracks to precision ball-bearing glides, but Blum Soft-Close Drawer Glides take performance up to a higher level. The moving parts of these high-quality glides sit below the drawer, so you don’t see them during normal use; the static parts of the glides are screwed into the sides of the cabinet, so you don’t see them either. The drawer attaches to the glides with quick-release clips, so you can easily remove the drawer for cleaning and replace it in a few seconds.

All that is nice, but what really sets these glides apart from all the others is their soft-close action. When you pull out the drawer, it gives a slight resistance for the first inch, then smoothly glides out to its full extension, bringing the back end of the drawer fully out of the cabinet and making all the drawer contents easy to access. When you push the drawer, it glides smoothly back, and in the last inch of travel, the Blumotion mechanism catches the drawer and gently eases it into the fully closed position. Regardless of how carelessly or enthusiastically you shove the drawer back, it never slams, and always returns to the proper closed position. Once you’ve tried these glides, you’ll never want to settle for anything less for your main kitchen drawers.

Accuride Glides

These ball-bearing glides work well for applications where you want smooth extension and retraction, but don’t really need the soft-close feature of the Blum drawer glides described above. We used them for all our sliding trays, for our toe-kick drawers, for our pull-out shelving units, for our pull-out coat rack, and for all the entry hall drawers (all discussed below).

Sliding Trays

If you’ve ever had to dig something out of the back of a deep kitchen base cabinet or over-appliance cabinet, you know what an unpleasant experience that can be. Sliding Trays eliminate that problem – like drawers, they bring the contents forward so that you can easily access everything, but they accommodate tall items better than drawers do. They’re ideal for any deep cabinet, and also for any cabinet in which you store heavy things like pots and glass cookware.

Toe-Kick Drawers

Broad, flat items like cookie sheets can be rather awkward to store. Piling other things on top of them in a cabinet makes them difficult to access, and storing them on edge in a cabinet inevitably ends up with them falling over onto other items. Some kitchen designs include a tall, narrow niche in which to store them, but such a niche can be difficult to incorporate if you’re working with stock cabinet boxes.

A simple, elegant solution that takes advantage of otherwise unused space is toe-kick drawers. These are mounted in the base unit below the cabinet box, such that the front of the drawer is flush with the vertical panel of the toe-kick space. Mounted on Accuride glides, they make broad, flat items easy to store and retrieve.

Toe-kick drawers are relatively easy to incorporate when you are installing new cabinets; they’re more challenging to add as retrofits.

Peninsula Cabinet

A peninsula cabinet isn’t suitable for every kitchen, but if it fits into your design, it can provide some nice benefits.

Into the end of our peninsula, we designed a shallow tall cabinet for dishes, a mug cabinet with a tilt-down panel that doubles as a staging shelf, and three drawers. All of those face the dish sink and dishwasher, so putting dishes away is fast and easy.

The center cabinets of our peninsula have doors on both sides, so all of their contents are easily accessible.

The middle-height center cabinet, at eye level, has glass doors, which brings some daylight into the kitchen and helps prevent a closed-in feeling.

Pantry

At the back end of the peninsula are deep pantry cabinets.

We optimized accessibility of the pantry contents more accessible by incorporating shallow shelves onto the back of the doors, and additional shallow shelves on swing-out shelving units mounted on piano hinges.

Behind the swing-out shelves are sliding trays that bring forward the items from the deepest part of the pantry.

Above the deep pantry (not visible here) is a large cabinet for bulky items like cereal boxes; sliding trays make the contents easy to access.

Pull-Out Shelving Units

When we planned our kitchen, the only sensible location for our refrigerator was adjacent to the floor-to-ceiling peninsula cabinet. To allow the refrigerator doors to open fully and keep them from banging into the peninsula cabinet, we had to allow a 12” space between the side of the refrigerator and the peninsula. Such a 12” space would normally be difficult to exploit effectively; it’s quite narrow, tall, and deep. Accessing it from the other side of the peninsula wouldn’t be practical, because it would be so deep.

The solution we designed has turned out to be one of the most useful features in our kitchen. We designed two pull-out shelving units mounted on Accuride glides, sized to accommodate standard cup, pint, and quart mason jars. The lower shelving unit is about 5 ? feet tall, and has 8 shelves that we fill with jars full of grains and other dry goods. (The jars protect the contents from moths and other pests). The upper shelving unit is about 3’ tall, and has 3 shelves in which we keep empty mason jars that we use for storing leftovers in the refrigerator. The shelves are only deep enough to hold 1 or 2 jars (depending on type), so any jar can be easily found and quickly accessed.

Microwave Niche

A microwave oven can be extremely handy when it’s in a convenient location. Ours resides at eye level in its own special niche located between the cooktop and the prep sink. The niche is lined with stone tile, which can handle the heat that the oven emits when it is used in convection mode.

Cutting Board Nook and Spice Drawer

The microwave niche did not need to be as wide as a standard 2-door cabinet, so we had about 9” available for something else. We used it for 2 features: a small drawer for spice jars, and a nook for storing cutting boards. I had no idea just how handy that nook would turn out to be—it keeps the cutting boards handy by the prep sink, and provides plenty of airflow to keep the cutting boards dry.

Appliance Garages

This concept, which I saw in a Sunset Magazine several decades ago, keeps small electric appliances close at hand and ready to use, but out of sight when you’re not using them. Some appliance garages sit on the back of standard counters and thus reduce the usable counter space, but we were able to design our garages so that their fronts are behind the full depth of the counters. (Our appliance garages are built into a shelving unit in the adjacent room.)

All of our appliance garages are equipped with power strips, so all the appliances are plugged in all the time and ready to use. When we need to use a toaster, blender, mixer, toaster oven, etc., we just pull the cover off the garage and pull out the appliance. Putting the appliance away is simply a matter of shoving it back and replacing the garage cover.

Stepstool/Cart Garage

Our kitchen has 10’ ceilings, and not all people are as tall as we are, so we needed to provide a way for people to reach items in high places. At the end of a cabinet peninsula, we created a garage in which we currently store a stepstool. (In the future, we may use the garage to store a small cart that could be used to move dishes and accessories between kitchen and dining areas.)

Extendable Coat Rack

Our entry area doesn’t have any good place for a regular coat closet, so we needed to come up with a solution for storing coats of visitors.

Inspired by the concept of the pull-out sliding shelf units in the kitchen, we designed an extendable coat rack that pulls out from under the stair landing.

Constructed of heavy-gauge aluminum brackets, U-channel, and pipe, and fitted with heavy-duty Accuride glides, the 4-foot rack accommodates 20-40 coats, and can easily be extended and retracted even when fully loaded.

To accommodate full-length coats, we mounted another rod in the under-stair space that is positioned over a well that doubles as a small wine cellar.

Slipper Drawer

Having adopted a no-shoes policy to minimize dirt and grit on our floors, we needed to make slippers readily available to arriving guests. Our solution is a triangular slipper drawer, mounted on heavy-duty Accuride glides, that makes efficient use of the triangular space at the bottom of the stairs.

Small Items Drawer

To accommodate small items that guests often carry (such as keys, phones, flashlights, and sunglasses) we designed a special drawer near the front door.

The drawer has a built-in power strip, so guests can plug in their devices for charging while visiting, and easily find their items when they are about to leave.

Backpack / Purse Drawers

Below the Small Items drawer is a set of 3 bin-like drawers that are handy for temporarily storing purses, backpacks, and similar-sized items that guests carry.

The 3 drawers and the small items drawer are all mounted on Accuride glides.

Easy-Store Shoe Shelf

When we began to host monthly house concerts drawing up to 50 guests, we needed an easy way to keep all their shoes organized as the guests arrived. Using some oak stair riser boards bought at a construction supply store, I built a simple 8-shelf unit that can be assembled in under 10 minutes.

The shelves are pinned into the side supports using truncated 10-penny nails, and after the shelves have all been pinned, the unit is strengthened and stabilized with diagonal cables that are tightened with turnbuckles. I use wire to affix the cables to stair balusters to prevent the whole unit from being tipped over. Guests can simply find a pair of slippers they like, and leave their shoes in its place.

The shelving unit can be disassembled in 5 minutes, and stored in a stack that takes up very little space.

What All These Designs Have In Common

These storage elements and designs all focus on using space efficiently, optimizing access, and maximizing convenience. I hope they sparked some ideas for how you might be able to improve your own living space.

Jim Schibler leads product management teams that deliver software experiences customers love, and he coaches professionals on job search and career management. He writes on a broad range of topics; see more of his articles at his website.

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