This is the start of a blog series about my Butterfly Cabinet project.

Butterfly Cabinet Ron Stewart

It started over a year ago with a request from my wife’s best friend for a small cabinet that would sit in the corner of her family room. It needed to be somewhat small, wider than tall, with an open cavity or shelf to hold an Amazon Echo Dot smart speaker. It also needed a drawer or cavity tall enough to hold a large bottle of nail polish remover. Ideally, its finish would complement that of other furniture (made in part of what I think is mahogany) in the family room and adjoining eating area.

Aside from those few requirements, she gave me total freedom over the design. She also wasn’t in any hurry. That freedom and time was a luxury, but it had a drawback: too many options leading to designer’s block and analysis paralysis. (It also led to other projects jumping the queue.)

I spent a lot of time on Pinterest and Google searching for “interesting cabinets” and found lots of inspiration, but nothing that seemed just right. She loves butterflies, and I decided to design something around that concept. I didn’t want to be too literal, so I spent tons more time searching for abstract representations of butterflies. I even read some books on graphic/icon design. (All of this research really strengthened my respect and admiration for artists, who can convey concepts with a few shapes, strokes, or blobs of color. I wish I had that ability.)

I found many interesting designs, but many of them seemed difficult to implement with wood, at least not by me. I really liked one piece of wall art, an abstract pair of wings composed of what looks to be long shards of some mineral. Again, there was no way for me to pull that off with wood, but the general idea stayed with me.

Eventually, I came up with the idea of using the Echo Dot (which is basically a small sphere) as the head of a butterfly, and that led to a narrow center section with shelves or drawers representing the head and body, with wings on either side. Then I thought of several ways to represent the wings, some very abstract, others less so.

I showed them to our friend, and she liked a design with narrow drawers in the center and doors that used clouds of small circles to convey wing shapes. (This design was loosely modeled on the wall art I mentioned above.) At the time, I was envisioning using wood plugs. Later, I thought about using metal (copper or brass) disks instead, to add a little bling and sparkle. I ultimately used 5/8” diameter brass stamping blanks (used by jewelry makers).

The drawer pulls are an important visual component, so I spend hours searching for ones that felt right. The pulls I liked most were very thin when viewed from the front, so I paired them (spaced 3/4“ apart) to add some visual presence without making them too bulky. The legs aren’t as important visually, but I still spent many hours finding the right ones.  My favorite set had tapered, elliptical cross-section legs rotated 45 degrees about their vertical axes, but they were too tall (6”). The closest thing I could find had rotated rectangular legs and were shorter (4”). (The SkechUp model contains scenes showing the pulls and legs I considered but did not select.)

It took several iterations to find the right spacing for the brass wing disks. They follow invisible arcs radiating from the center.

Here’s the final design.

At the beginning of the project, I had modeled the room so I could place the cabinet in it. It’s angled in the corner to hide a power brick and a mass of TV-related switches and coax cables in the corner for a TV above the fireplace (not modeled). That hide-the-mess purpose is another reason shorter legs were better than taller ones. With the taller legs, I likely would have needed to install a “modesty panel” across the back underside of the cabinet to hide the equipment and cables. With the shorter legs, those items are not visible.