Most furniture does exactly what it promises. A shelf holds things. A table provides surface. A sideboard stores what you don’t want to look at. Deniz Aktay, a Stuttgart-based designer, seems to find that level of literalism a little boring.
His latest piece, the “Slot” Sideboard, is a sleek metal sideboard that does something I haven’t seen before: it swallows your books whole. Or nearly whole. The top surface features book-shaped cutouts, slots sized just right to accept a few volumes that then slide partway through, hovering suspended between the top of the sideboard and the interior shelf below. Spines tilted at an angle, partially disappearing into the furniture itself, the books aren’t hidden. They’re put on stage.
Designer:
The visual effect is genuinely arresting. From straight on, it looks like the books are simply leaning through the sideboard, defying the expected logic of furniture. The steel body, finished in a dusty blue-grey, stays completely clean and minimal, which only makes the books pop harder. They become the focal point. The design knows this and leans into it.
Aktay trained as an architect at the University of Stuttgart before founding his own design studio, DEZIN, in 2020. You can feel the architectural thinking in the Slot Sideboard. The slots aren’t decoration. They are a structural decision that reorganizes how the object functions. By cutting through the plane of the top surface, Aktay collapses the boundary between storage and display. The books don’t live behind a door or on top of the piece as an afterthought. They are literally built into its architecture.
This matters more than it might seem. One of the persistent design problems with books is exactly this tension: do you store them, or do you show them? Traditional bookshelves say store, with display as a side effect. Coffee table styling says display, with access sacrificed. The Slot Sideboard says both, simultaneously, and solves the problem by making books a structural element rather than an accessory.
I appreciate that the piece doesn’t shout about this. It’s not a novelty object with an obvious gimmick printed on the side. At rest, without books, the sideboard is clean and almost brutally minimal, the stepped slot openings looking like an architectural section drawing. Add a few books, and the whole thing shifts register. It becomes warmer, more personal, more lived-in. That kind of dual identity in a single object is hard to pull off.
Aktay’s philosophy centers on finding the right balance between proportion, material, and functionality. The Slot Sideboard is a good example of that balance working. The proportions are long and low, giving the piece the kind of horizontal calm that makes a room feel settled. The metal construction is precise without feeling cold. And the function is genuinely expanded by the design, not just dressed up.
The one thing I keep thinking about is the practical question of how many books actually fit, and at what angle. The promotional images show a small cluster, maybe three or four volumes, tilted together in the slot. It reads beautifully. Whether it reads the same with a thicker, heavier hardback, or with books of wildly different heights, is a detail that a real-world test would answer. That’s not a criticism so much as natural curiosity. Good design always makes you want to live with it.
The broader trend here is worth noting. Furniture design has been slowly, quietly moving away from pure storage and toward what you might call narrative objects, pieces that make a room tell a story. The Slot Sideboard fits into that movement while having its own specific logic. It isn’t just pretty. It has a point of view about what books are for and where they belong. They belong where people can see them. Where they’re part of the room. Not filed away. Whether or not Aktay set out to make a statement about books and visibility, the piece makes one. And it makes it beautifully.
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