My Search for a Modular (and Stylish) Storage Solution for Loft Living

Welcome to Someone Buy This!, a monthly shopping column featuring the fun, the frivolous, and the practical from a very discerning shopper.

I recently tackled a tricky design project that involved procuring a piece of furniture that could serve two distinct spaces and be seen from all sides. Saddled with these self-imposed and extremely difficult requirements, (seriously, what is my problem?) I looked to midcentury-modern furniture for inspiration.

If you dare to ask an interior designer—or worse, venture into a design subReddit—you’ll get different answers as to what "MCM" actually is. What’s relevant for our purposes here are my two favorite characteristics of this aesthetic. First is functionality, which, to me, means the piece is doing more than one job or serving more than one space. Second is a 360 design, meaning the piece was designed with an open floor living in mind so it looks good from all sides.

My boyfriend and I live in a loft with a completely open floor plan. While this obviously presents some design challenges, I really love that rooms can be whatever and wherever I want. For this particular project, I needed something that could serve as double-sided storage and a room divider between the bedroom and dining room. I decided to focus on modular storage systems that looked good from all sides. As much as I love my apartment, I’m a renter. And I need the furniture I buy to be flexible enough to fit into wherever I live next. Despite these extremely specific requirements, I found some really good options.

My first stop was Lucca House, which makes modular grid shelves. I love the detail of the colored banding, and the option for a flat-top surface or open-grid look. Though the shelves are mostly pictured against a wall on the brand’s website, they work well as freestanding pieces. This is a really great open storage room divider option. While measuring and talking through how it would work in our space, we eventually realized we actually needed closed storage. 

Before that realization, I went back to a browser tab that we’ve opened at least a hundred times in the last year: the Ikea Elvarli. It’s a modular storage system with your choice of drawers and open shelves, supported by a big tension rod between the floor and ceiling. What I love about the Elvarli is that it can be fashioned so that you get table or console-level surfaces plus storage higher up. It looks good in person too, as long as you stick to the all-white pieces. (The wood shelf options look and feel a little cheap, in my opinion.) I decided this was too tall for my purposes but think this would be a great option for anyone looking for a mixed storage room divider.

To my bank account’s dismay, the next stop on our shopping journey was USM. USM is the gold standard of modular furniture. Just look at this USM kitchen from the cover story of Dwell’s November/December 2023 issue! These pieces are timeless and can be repurposed endlessly. And based on my cursory searches of Facebook Marketplace and eBay, they hold their value pretty well, too. We ventured into the USM design tool knowing it was out of our budget, but we just had to see what was possible. We tried out a few different configurations and kept coming in at around $8,000, which was just not possible for us.

USM may have been a flop for us price-wise but using their design tool helped us narrow down our needs for this piece. When I came across Thuma’s Nest dresser in a TikTok video, I knew this was the one. I was locked in on how quickly the creator—a self-described "lifestyle curator"—stacked up the drawers and locked them into place. The Nest dresser is modular and requires no real assembly—at least not "assembly" as we’ve come to know it. You buy the drawers and/or shelves that you need and simply stack them on top of each other. They’re held together by a giant screw, which you tighten by hand. They can be stacked as high as five drawers and come with optional hardware to secure them to a wall. I liked this system so much that my boyfriend and I took a trip to their new flagship store in Soho to see it in person and, more specifically, to see the back. When we explained our needs to a sales rep, she kindly pulled one of the display dressers away from the wall so we could get a full 360 view. It looked great!

We settled on two four-drawer sections and one section with four open shelves. The dresser sections are attached vertically, not horizontally, meaning we could have the drawer sections face the bedroom and the open shelves face the dining room while still maintaining one continuous surface up top. The height and length worked out perfectly for our needs. But honestly, I wasn’t sweating it. If our needs changed we could rearrange the pieces however we wanted. That flexibility is priceless.

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