Custom Welded Bar Shelving
When I hit the phones for to look for new business, it’s not a complicated decision process that I use to decide on who to call. I go to, pretty much, two different sets of people: businesses that I know for a fact will need welding services or other custom metal fabrication, like carpentry crews, and businesses that I just flat out enjoy. This particular project came about from the latter. My client here is actually the very wedding venue where I got married!
This wedding venue is a gorgeous and eclectic one…every facet of the space made of or populated by pieces of Americana antiquity. Fitting a custom welded set of shelves into the space, stylistically, was certainly a head-scratcher. To be candid, I was drawing blanks…
This is the space…
Eclectic, wide open and able to breathe, warm and bright, but still with a reclaimed, almost industrial aesthetic. The real design challenge here was to decide what facet of the space to lean into when designing a copacetic welded shelving unit for the bar space.
It seems pretty obvious now, but it took two bourbons and about an hour and a half of hanging out with my client and his lead bartender before we arrived at this design…a little art deco with some other design elements that I don’t even know the name of. An important request point for the shelves was that they manage to soften the space they occupy…a big ask for a custom welded, 30” tall, steel shelving unit. It’s all-but necessary that shelving units have all straight lines and right angles, and that’s exactly what we designed, but with the use of a little CNC laser work on the design flourishes and generous use of copper.
As always, when the design is done, the next step to get down and dirty, fire up the MIG welder, and start welding…and here are the components as they were finished…not terribly exciting when broken into its parts…a little CNC cut project here, some welding and grinding there. Genuinely, if you don’t know what you’re looking at, it may as well be a flux capacitor yeah? Fabricating and welding projects like this are more than a little maddening for this fact, because, even knowing what I’m looking at, no matter how much I KNOW the final piece will turn out beautifully, I still hold my breath from the first weld arc striking all the way to install. I’m pleased to say that all my breath-holding was unnecessary, because this shelving fit in the space like a custom welded glove.
