For a while now, I've been wanting to make a new side table to sit between my reading chair and my bed. The trouble, is that my relatively low bed would need a different height table than the chair. The table would need to work for both heights.

My initial idea centered on an open box, which would be lifted off the ground with copper pipes. The bottom of the box could be bed-height, and the top for chair. I noodled around with this idea and different systems for achieving 2 heights until ultimately abandoning the box in favor of a "ribbon" design. The top surface doubles back on itself to form the shelf and base giving the appearance of a continuous band. This gave me the 2 heights I wanted and helped open up the side that faced the bed. I honed in pretty quickly on the key issue with this design: how to support the ribbon element without distracting or taking away from it as the key design feature.

With basic design in place, I started to assess actual dimension, materials, and tried to sort out this question of construction. Initially, it made sense to have a simple rib supporting down the middle, but I worried that a thin edge would confuse the continuity of the ribbon's thin edge. If this were a building, the solution would be to make it a mass rather than a plane, a drawer perhaps? Material would probably be plywood, which might give me a chance to try iron on edge banding. Maybe I could punch up the ribbon edge with a dark stained edge banding. At this point in the design process, I need to see things proportional to each other, which means sketching won't cut it any longer. Time to get digital!