This is a shoe/coat rack that I designed and built in 2008 and 2009. Unfortunately I didn’t do a good job of documenting this one, so all of the information is after the fact.
I went through several iterations building this to scale. The biggest problem being getting the hinges right. I wanted this to really look like a free standing shoji screen was up in the corner, so I made the angles fairly odd, 62 degrees on the short side and 112 degrees on the long side. While this made the screen look very convincing, it made it damn near impossible to find hinges that would attach to the frame that I had built. On top of that, I wanted the edges of the doors to be very close to each other to again convey that this was a free standing shoji screen, so regular old barrel hinges were out of the question. I ended up mounting a few dividers into the frame in such a way that I got a 90 degree surface to mount european style cabinet hinges to. The divider is very small and doesn’t extend into the coat section at all, so it’s not distracting. The door on the left has 4 hinges for strength (my 4 year old son uses that door, so it got extra bracing) and opens to the right. The two doors on the right are hinged together using non-mortise style flush mount hinges and 4 european hinges. The two doors collapse together naturally when you open them and the door farthest to the right is 2 inches narrower to avoid all of the other hinges once it is fully opened.
The finish was sprayed by Kiels Custom Colors and is a very glossy black. The brown backer board is just hardboard and then I put laminated rice paper from eshoji over the board with 3M spray adhesive. The rice paper can be wiped with a damp rag and is much tougher then regular due to the laminate. It also holds up to the humidity and heat that it will experience due to it’s location and function.
Overall, I’m very pleased with how this project worked out. All of the odd angles made it a challenge, but the pay off is worth it. Hope you enjoyed!