Industrial Design trends take items you’d normally find in any Lumber Yard and re-purpose them with stunning effects. More and more we’re seeing Interior Designers using everyday building materials such as Plywood, Engineered Wood Products and even surplus items like Pallets and incorporating them into homes to provide unique features that become central to the overall theme of your home’s decor.
In this article we’ve selected seven of our favourite alternative and creative uses for building products as design features inside the home.
1. Stacked Lumber Dresser
Dennler’s Wooden Heap (pictured below), is a set of drawer units that looks like a woodpile and can be stacked in different configurations. This piece will become part of the permanent display in the V&A’s new furniture gallery after London Design Festival. [source]
This would be an ambitious project for a beginner to take on, but the concept provides a variety of options should you choose to build something similar, perhaps re-purposing an old dresser or drawer unit in the process. You could certainly keep the cost down by cladding an old unit with scrap or re-claimed lumber and get an eye-catching and unique feature for your home in the process.
Materials needed:
- Pre-made Dresser (or components to build bespoke)
- Lumber
- Glue
Budget $0-1000
2. Reclaimed Wood Clad Feature Wall
Get the rustic look of barn-door chic with a wooden clad feature wall, an extremely stunning option to infuse heat, depth, texture and curiosity to your home. Often made from reclaimed lumber, a wooden clad feature wall is a versatile design feature that can add character to any room. Whether it’s reclaimed, white washed, painted or even made from deconstructed wooden pallets, the natural patina of wooden provides an unlimited amount of unique patterns to choose from. [re-worded from source]
You can even use reclaimed lumber or wood painted in a way that gives is a worn and weathered character and sliding door hardware to construct fantastic feature barn doors like these pictured below.
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Materials needed:
- Reclaimed Lumber or Weathered Lumber or New Lumber with an ageing stain or treatment applied. This type of lumber is readily available at our Yard, as are the products you might need to create this effect on new wood, like Minwax Stains.
- Paint or Stain
Budget $0-500
3. Parallam Beam Stairs & Steps
Engineered Wood has become an architectural feature for both Commercial and Residential buildings, with the industrial look offering texture and patterns that are not available from traditional decorative lumber profiles. Whilst Glulam beams – with their assembled 2×4 construction – offer a linear, lumber like character, more variable products such as Ganglam and in particular Parallam beams offer striking random strand figuring that can provide an eye-catching detail.
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Materials needed:
- Engineered Wood Beams – Ganglam (LVL), Glulam or Parallamsold by the linear ft. Call for pricing.
- Liquid Glass or Epoxy to fill any cavities (Parallam only)
- Clear or Tinted Wood Stain to finish
Budget $100-250 per tread
4. Plywood & OSB Cabinet Doors
Plywood is one of our most versatile building materials and it has many advantages that make it a favourite for many designers looking for an industrial edge.There are an extensive range of plywood species, thicknesses and grades to choose from meaning you can bespoke the look to suit your own design theme, adding paint or stain or accent colour where necessary to give your decor an interesting edge. You can combine Plywood or other Sheet goods as a design feature along with regular Kitchen Cabinetry or use cut Plywood sheets to create and assemble a set of unique Cabinets and Drawers or even countertops that make your kitchen stand out from the norm.
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The linear pattern characteristic of the edge of plywood sheets can be used to create a sharp design feature in contrast to the signature wide, flat grain pattern on the exposed face. These counter tops and cabinets use this feature well to break up solid blocks of flat colour used on the kitchen cabinet doors and drawers.
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View our range of Kitchen & Bathroom Cabinets
Go!
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Materials needed:
- Plywood or OSB (Oriented Strand Board)
- Cabinet Door Hardware
- Paint or Stain
Budget $100-1000+
5. Pallet Coffee Tables
It seems there are unlimited uses for shipping pallets both outside and inside the home. Pallets can be deconscructed to accumulate weathered wood that often has characteristic stamps, lettering or marks that can be used as a design feature, but perhaps one of the easiest ways to use them is in the original state, sanitized with wheels attached to make a rustic/industrial style coffe table. Pallets are easily stacked to provide variable height and the weathered wood is ideal for painting or staining to fit with your colour scheme.
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Materials needed:
- Clear or Tinted Wood Stain to finish
- New or Old Wood Pallet
- Wood Cleaner/Brightener if you are using old, dirty wood pallets
- Casters (Wheels) or fixed legs if you don’t plan on moving the table
Budget $50-$100
6. End Cut Feature Walls & Shelving
You could DIY this wall treatment by simply applying cut end pieces of 4×6 or 4×8’s to sheets of plywood with construction adhesive, then applying the entire sheet to the wall. Stain the whole wall as one piece to create a uniform look. The individual wood pieces only need to be an inch or two deep, and we love the slightly different depths for each one, creating a texture and unique pattern every time. Use end-cuts or re-purposed wood and it becomes a budget project as well!
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Materials needed:
- Reclaimed Lumber or Weathered Lumber or New Lumber with an ageing stain or treatment applied. This type of lumber is readily available at our Yard, as are the products you might need to create this effect on new wood, like Minwax Stains.
- Paint or Stain
Budget $0-500
7. Scrap Wood Centerpiece
Taking it’s design inspiration from a Mexican Sugar Mold [more info], this wood feature works well as a succulent planter for your bathroom or window, or for candle centerpiece for your dining table. You can easily construct using reclaimed wood, or distress new wood with and interior or exterior wood stain or wax.
[source]
[source]
Materials needed:
- Dimensional Lumber
- Spade or Forstner Bit
- Wood Stain or Wax
Budget $25-75
Author: Jake Revill, Marketing Manager, POCO Building Supplies
Published 29th October 2015
