Talking with Giulio Cappellini and James Irvine the idea came up to do a range of household accessories. At the time it was an area of the market which had been completely ignored by companies working with designers, and it seemed to us there was big potential in working on some useful products with a lot of young designers. The briefing was open but there was somehow a feeling in the air of combining different functions or revisiting forgotten themes. The book safes were to be made of wood and to have titles like ‘Birds of Europe, Volume IV’ to improve the camouflage, but printing the titles was too expensive. The mirror shelf was a nice example of these combined functions, although the process of bending the glass has unfortunate distortional consequences for the mirror which we are still trying to resolve.
Extracted from Everything But the Walls by Jasper Morrison (Lars Müller Publishers, 2006).
Above: Book Safe, a cloth-covered wood structure in red, blue and green.
Mirror Shelf, a combination of the traditional bathroom mirror and glass shelf.
Wastepaper Basket, made of 3 mm beech plywood.