Cherry and Birdseye Maple Tansu

The tansu is a Japanese storage tradition that prizes modularity, craftsmanship, and the beauty of the object as much as its function. This three-tier example takes that tradition seriously on every count.

The piece was designed for a specific room, its stepped profile echoing the rise of the staircase railing it abuts — a custom fit that makes the cabinet feel inevitable in its setting rather than placed there. Proud mortise and through-tenon joinery marks every corner, making the construction legible and decorative at once. Drawers are fitted with half-blind dovetails; doors slide wood-on-wood in both vertical and horizontal orientations, their birdseye maple panels bringing the same chatoyance to the tansu that quilted maple brings to the credenza — a figure that catches light differently from every angle.

Both faces of the cabinet are finished show sides. Drawers slide free of their cases from either direction; doors open on both faces. A tansu positioned between two spaces gives each its own access to the same storage — a genuinely useful property in an open-plan room, and one that makes the joinery worth admiring from every direction.

The three cases stack and separate independently, and the modular design extends beyond this installation: one case, two, or more can be combined in configurations suited to any space. Built to order.