Harborage Pantry
Can’t find the right hardware? Just make it.
These panels were designed in close collaboration with Architect, Chelsea Hyduk for a residential renovation in northern MI. The final installation is made entirely of solid white oak and shop made blackened steel hardware.
In our experience architects tend to be cut from a certain cloth. Meticulous in their planning and driven by their vision, but flexible enough to work through a project’s inevitable challenges.
After creating some initial samples to determine slat width, spacing and the levels of obscurity they would create, we began to develop a plan for fabrication.
At face value, this project was relatively straightforward —wooden slats covering a closet cutout, newly framed, in a renovated kitchen.
The challenge was to design and build this functional facade in a way that was structurally sound, straightforward to install, and didn’t detract from the minimal look we were trying to achieve.
Custom door pulls were made with milled grooves for your fingers to grip onto.
In order to accomplish this, we spec’d the onsite fabrication of a sub-frame to be built by the local GC. This sub-frame ensured that there would be predictable places to secure the panels when the time came. We didn’t want to apply any unnecessary forces to the slats themselves, so we designed custom hinges with an oversized leaf to allow us to secure them not only to the panels but also to the sub-frame. To keep it all consistent we decided to make a set of complementary door pulls as well.
The final panels were sent to their new home and installed by the GC in a matter of hours. Thanks to Chelsea’s meticulous measurements and excellent coordination, they required no additional scribing or adjustments.
