Our collection of handmade pottery suddenly expanded overnight last year, and cabinet space was tight. Enter these pottery shelves, which I built over the course of a few cold nights in the workshop. We didn’t want to hide the bowls in cabinets so these are pretty simple open shelves to display them. Plus it’s easy to grab one off the shelf, though I sometimes spend an extra couple seconds deciding which one will be juuust right…
Simple Pottery Shelves
There’s not much too these shelves. The sides have dados to hold each shelf, which are then nailed in from the sides. I used poplar ’cause it’s what I had at the time, plus it’s cheap, plus I actually like how it looks. For the back boards, I dug out some fortunately rotted (but not too rotted) poplar, with enough rot to give it some interesting streaks of color. (I don’t feel so bad about not protecting that pile of lumber so well anymore!)
I’m a big fan of open shelves, and A Pattern Language has this brutally simple diagnosis of kitchen cabinetry:
“Cupboards that are too deep waste valuable space, and it always seems that what you want is behind something else.”
True that.
