The number one advantage of owning a castle is not the massive estate or the 50 rooms to house a few flight crews on a stopover, but rather the secret doorways and passages popular knowledge will have us believe all castles are riddled with. Now not all of us can afford the down payment for one of these babies, but Torafu Architects have created the next best thing, a floating shelf with a secret drawer.
Clopen (perhaps a bastardization of the Dutch "kloppen" meaning "knock"?) is at first glance just a normal floating shelf à la Ikea. But it contains a secret drawer to hold all your most valuables. At a height of 34mm, nobody would suspect that anything could be held inside, but the 24 mm deep tray is perfect for passports, jewelry, keys and other odds and sods that you may need to hide from prying fingers. In the spirit of Japanese trick boxes, magnets can be used to slide open the secret compartment. Clopen is made of a number of aluminum parts covered in a wood veneer that has been placed to make the shelf look like a solid block.
Torafu has made a number of products that do more than what they seem to. Clopen adds to its credentials as a smart thinking office looking for ways to improve our lives in little ways and we can't wait to see what they come up with next.
