The last week I’ve been focused on looking at solving the storage needs that the Charleston Parks Conservancy has provided to us. I’ve been explaining our project as a shaded pavilion in a public park with garden tool storage, but storage and shade seem like the most important components to me.
Leslie from the Charleston Parks Conservancy provided us with a list, and I did some online research to ensure the sizes of the equipment and start to understand scale in relationship to the human body and ergonomics.
I had originally imagined these to be something like kitchen cabinets, and for them to be about 30″ x 30″ x 86″ with a sloping top. My ideal material to clad them would be copper, which would age over time with the architecture and the garden.
I looked at options where it was a long bar of single sided storage on the west side of the pavilion, or had a full length counter top; this ended up not being a good solution because of the chalkboard behind the counter top. I was concerned for horizontal accessible reach, and after looking up ANSI 117.1-2009 and ADA 2010 codes I thought it was better to have a deeper cabinet in the middle so it was accessible to everyone.
I looked at possible options for what the door system might look like from an elevation point of view, and if it had louvers, or polycarbonate (Lexan) panels between the rails and stile construction. I imagined a simple dado joint run on all of the wood pieces so the polycarbonate would be on the inside of the doors.
Michael Mioux and I had a lot of conversations about the possibility of using barn doors; I think it would be better if the inner two doors (cabinets #3 and #4 above) were on a barn door track but doors 1,2,5, and 6 were more traditional hinged doors.
Here is a video of how I imagined the wheelbarrows that we need to store in the two or three wheelbarrows in a vertical solution. This could easily be built for a low cost, affordable, easy-to-build, and easy to operate system. It is as simple as a few pieces of wood, two lag bolts, and some careful measurements.
I am missing some photographs of my study models; I will take some photographs of them to share in an update next week on this post, but here are some photos of my thinking and process:
Studying scale with the human body
3/4″ = 1′-0″ tiny shovels, forks, and leaf rakes.
One wheel wheelbarrow – top view; I never made the bottom, so it won’t store too much soil or mulch, ha!
The final proposal model (collaboration with Matt Kelly) showing the storage on the west side.
Recommended reading : The complete illustrated guide to furniture & cabinet construction / Andy Rae.
This has been a fascinating book to learn about cabinet construction methods and options. I’d be interested in working on details of how we can make these over the next week while we work on the project’s construction drawing phase.
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