Butterfly Cabinet

This is a decorative floor-standing cabinet I built for my wife’s best friend.  She loves butterflies, so I based the design around that. I didn’t want to be too literal, so I modeled a half-dozen or so concepts with varying degrees of abstraction. The design I built is a refinement of the option she liked the most.

One firm requirement was an open shelf or cavity to hold her Echo Dot smart speaker, which is basically a small sphere. (I don’t own an Echo Dot, so I used a glazed ceramic ball on a furniture slider as a stand-in in some of the photos.)

Several cabinet elements represent parts of a butterfly. The center column, with its open top cavity for the Echo Dot and short and tall drawers, represents the head and body segments. Vertically oriented drawer pulls, paired to increase visual presence without adding heaviness, reinforce the body segment concept. Each door contains a cloud of 5/8” diameter brass disks in the shape of a wing. The disks sit in shallow wells and follow arced paths radiating from the door’s inner edges.

The doors don’t have knobs or pulls, so I routed finger pulls on their inner edges near the open top cavity. (The best way to open a door is with the side of an index finger.)

The cabinet is approximately 36” wide, 29” tall, and 13” deep. It’s made of maple lumber, except for the back panels, which are 1/4” maple plywood. The finish is TransTint Brown Mahogany dye, Zinsser SealCoat (shellac), and General Finishes High Performance Water Based poly (flat sheen).

For more design details and construction photos, please see the corresponding blog series and the SketchUp model in 3D Warehouse. (If you view the SU model, please use the custom scenes to navigate the model.)

In any case, thanks for looking!