
The pull-out laundry baskets with cloth liners are from Häfele.ĭetail of the Laundry Basket and Jewelry Tray They run on Blum undermount drawer slides with a soft-close feature. The drawers are all solid wood made with dovetails and 1/2" thick plywood bottoms. The doors are hinged with concealed, soft-closing Salice Silentia hinges. Similarly, we color-matched (and grain-matched as best as possible) the raised panels - many of which needed to be glued together to create the wide panels. We also grain-matched adjacent stiles and rails to present a nice, flow from piece to piece so that it looks like a unified project rather than individual components. To keep with the feel of the old house, we used raised panels and ovolo coping and sticking on the stiles and rails. The doors and drawer fronts are, indeed, made of solid sapele. To prevent racking, they are secured to the toe kick bases and to wood blocking above the cabinets (concealed by the sapele crown molding). Since the walls were covered with cedar planking, the cabinets have no backs. Although the client initially wanted all solid wood, we were able to convince him that veneer covered plywood was an acceptable alternative for the cabinets while assuring him that the doors and drawer fronts would be solid wood - and beautiful.

#MICROVELLUM TOOLBOX SUBASSEMBLIES FULL#
The cabinets are frameless cabinets and the doors and drawer fronts are full overlay. With the list of cut parts and print outs of the optimized way to cut the plywood panels from Microvellum's Toolbox software, the fabrication of these cabinets went quickly and smoothly. Rendering of Center City Closet Project Construction We needed to make sure that the shortened door would clear not only the window seat but any future cushion that may be placed upon it (although it would be a tragedy to hide the beautiful quarter-sawn sapele seat). In this job, the most complex part was around the window seat. This allows us to see any potential problem areas and to figure out any complicated areas. With this advanced design software, we are able to layout the project exactly as it will be built. We designed the center city closet (and all our other projects) using Microvellum Toolbox 7 software. Just before finalizing the plans, we suggested that they add some glass doors to provide some display space for finer items and to break up the wall of sapele doors. The clients opted to stick with the standard closet rods and shelves for the most part rather than pull-out/down rods but they did want pull-out necklace/belt/scarf racks, jewelry trays, and laundry baskets. In addition, by shortening a door near the window on the back wall, we were able to squeeze in a window seat with four drawers below it. While the hanging and shelf space would be easily accommodated by the cabinets along the wall, there was enough floor space (between the two glass floor plates that let you look down the stair well) for a set of island cabinets. They also wanted a mix of hanging, shelf, and drawer space. Since people may be walking through this space to reach the deck beyond, we decided that 24" deep cabinets with doors would be best so that it felt more like a room as you passed through it. After talking to him and his wife and what they wanted to store in the space and how they planned to use it, we began to form a basic design. After discussing various options, we decided to use sapele which has a nice warm color. Since he wanted a special space, he wanted solid wood. Design PhaseĪt our initial meeting, the client complained about the designs he had seen so far: too small looked to much like a closet built of melamine, etc. We have built numerous projects for this client so after talking to numerous closet companies, he called us because he wanted something special for this room - not the usual prefabricated closet cabinetry.


While there was a small elevator to take us and the tools up and down, anything over seventy-eight inches (basically all the cabinet sides and doors) had to be carried up the over one hundred stairs and four or six floors depending on how you count the staggered floors. The back door leads out on to the deck which overlooks another deck below and provides a great view of the skyline just beyond Rittenhouse Square.

It is perched on the top floor of this 150 year old, two million dollar, five thousand square feet home. The room itself is roughly sixteen feet by sixteen feet. The cabinets are fully twenty-four inches deep and just under eight feet tall. We built this Center City closet for a long-time client who said, "What my wife wants, she gets!" This closet is bigger than most Philadelphia kitchens.
