Here’s a clever bit of design just waiting to show up in your own coffee table post-circular-saw-and-Adderall bender: slots in the top to allow magazines to hang through. Of course, if you don’t keep them full of magazines, you’ll lose errant snack chips through the grill, which may or may not be a good thing.
It’s only $160 at Umbra which isn’t bad as furniture goes, but it’s nothing fancy, either.
Editorial Control [NYMag.com via Uncrate]
Lousy design.
Difficult to see which magazines are in the table—much less what their cover stories are—and equally difficult to retrieve the magazines from the table. Combine that with drips and spills ruining the covers of mags from beverages placed on the table and you’ve got a real loser.
I actually really love the concept and design. No… It’s not “user friendly,” but I’m fine by that. It encourages exploration (for guests; I’ll know which magazine is which, anyway).
My problem with it is that… well… I have hyper kids and a sometimes clumsy girlfriend. Drinks would be sure to spill. On a standard coffee table, I can grab my magazines and books really quick and wipe them off. With this thing, I don’t know if it would effect the magazines more, but the liquid would surely drip through the slats to the floor (which is carpeted).
This is not a user-friendly design. Unless a magazine has a spine with the title on it, you can’t tell which magazine is in a slot without a tedious “sideways shuffle” through the hanging mags, or by pulling out magazines one at a time until you find the right one. And mags that do have wider, printed spines don’t hang from a wire or dowel very well. You can’t pack nearly as many hanging mags into a given volume, compared to a plain old stack.
Looks like a great cat toy.
wouldn’t that just ruin the binding of your new issue of, say, dwell?
I wouldn’t mind having a table like that, maybe then I’d actually read them. It’s worth $160 if it’s not made of pressed wood; God knows we all hate that crap.
there’s another downside: you’ve got to have magazines of a certain length and width. looks like readers digest and rolling stone mag readers are at a disadvantage.