Shelving (and Other Storage) Made from Cardboard and Other Pasteboard

PASTEBOARD: A class of thick paper used chiefly for making boxes and cartons, and for spacing and lining. ...

Cardboard is usually a good-quality chemical pulp or rag pasteboard used for cards, signs, or printed material, of for the best-quality boxes. ...

Chipboard is a cheap board made from mixed scrap paper, used for boxes and book covers. When made with a percentage of mechanical wood pulp, it is called pulpboard.

-- Materials Handbook, by George Stuart Brady, Henry R. Clauser, John A. Vaccari

Reading those definitions, you sure don't think about furniture, do you? And yet a number of companies, around the world, are indeed making shelving using these products.

The shelves above come from ReturDesign Studio in Sweden; this company makes quite a number of interesting shelves and other storage pieces. In case you were wondering, the 3,999 Swedish kroner translate to 466 U.S. dollars (as of this moment).



These come from Cardboardesigns. They are made in the U.S. from recycled cardboard. [via re-nest] Update on June 29, 2011: The Cardboardesigns web site isn't working; I don't know if this is a temporary problem or if the company is gone.




Over in Italy, A4Adesign provides these modular bookshelves. [via Terramia]




These shelves come from Muji, a Japanese company with stores in many countries. [via Books At Home]




And over in France, there's a group of people, some of whom call themselves les cartonnistes, making furniture from carton (cardboard) - much of it quite fanciful. You can see their work here and here; you might also want to check out the links to individual artist's web sites. [via Instructables]




This piece got a lot of attention when it was featured on Apartment Therapy; it's sometimes being attributed to Eric Guiomar, the French movement's founder, but it seems to actually come from Elsa Pagis, who calls it l'étagère spirale.