The Vellum furniture design competition is held every year in San Luis Obispo and is usually participated in by 5th year architecture students at the school. The works are judged by an expert panel for beauty, originality, sustainability and other traits.

For the competition I wanted to design a bookshelf that was both aesthetically pleasing and fulfilled a unique function. I ended up with a bookshelf designed to fit into the corner of a space that holds the books in a dynamic manner. The angles and nooks of the shelf help guide how the books are displayed, as well as provide support.

The shelf is constructed out of Poplar boards and finished by hand with sandpaper and Tung Oil to accentuate the natural grains of the wood. The piece ended up being roughly 5 feet tall and 3 feet wide on each of the sides. Out of over 150 entries I was awarded a runner up award to 1st place for my design and received numerous offers to buy it.

I designed this piece in three iterations, that can be seen in my study models. I started with a more typical shelf and simply angled the verticals to make it more visually interesting. Then I decided that I wanted this piece to solve a problem so I adjusted it to work with a corner of a room, a space that is usually under utilized and not made for a typical bookshelf. Finally I decided that if I was going to work with a corner then I needed to work entirely with it and detach from the ground plane and make it mountable to the walls.