FURNITURE
In 1948, a Danish designer named Poul Cadovius looked at a typical living room and decided the furniture was in the wrong place. Sideboards and bookcases were heavy, floor-bound, and impossible to move. The walls, meanwhile, were doing almost no work. His solution was to put the shelves on the wall, hang them on a rail, and let the homeowner decide what went where. He called it the Royal System, and it is arguably the first modular shelving system ever made.
A year later, in Sweden, Nisse and Kajsa Strinning did something similar with a different engineering approach. Sixty years after that, a Belgian architect working in Copenhagen redesigned the problem from scratch, replacing rails and brackets with a set of stackable cubes held together by clips. Each of those three systems is still in production. All three are pieces we sell and install for clients across Canada, and all three solve the same underlying problem in a different way.
This is a guide to the modular shelving systems we recommend most often, why each one exists, and where each one belongs in a room.
DK3 Royal System
The Royal System is a wall-hung rail system. Two or more vertical rails mount to the wall, and every other component in the catalogue hangs off those rails on brass or stainless steel hooks. The catalogue itself is broad. Shelves, magazine rails, desktops, cabinets with push doors, cabinets with sliding doors, drop-front desks, rippled-glass doors, handwoven veneer fronts. Nothing touches the floor. Everything is reconfigurable. Cadovius claimed the original system could be arranged in sixteen million combinations, which was marketing but not wildly exaggerated.
Cadovius's logic was that most of us live on the bottom of a cube, and that if the walls do the storage work, the floor gets given back to the room. Seventy-eight years later, that idea has aged better than almost anything else from the period. It is the system we recommend when a client wants the whole wall to work as storage without the wall feeling full. Brass hangers read warmer and belong with walnut. Stainless steel reads sharper and holds up better under heavy loads.
The Royal System is the one system that looks like it was built for the wall it lives on. Once the shelves and cabinets are loaded, the rails disappear, and what is left reads as architecture rather than furniture.
Jenna, Interior Design Specialist
Royal System is configured to order, which means planning it well at the start is the difference between a wall that works and a wall that fights you. Our design team maps the rails, components, and finishes for every Royal System install we ship, and we do it as part of the consultation. Plan a Royal System configuration with our design studio.
String Furniture System
Nisse Strinning designed the String System in 1949, a year after Cadovius. The engineering is completely different. Where Royal System hangs everything off wooden rails, String uses bent-wire side panels that mount to the wall, and the shelves, cabinets, and desks rest between them. The wire side panels are the visual signature of the system. They almost disappear against a white wall, which is why a large String wall can hold a significant amount of material without ever feeling heavy.
We recommend String when the priority is visual lightness. In a smaller living room or a hallway, the wire panels let the wall breathe, and the eye reads each shelf as a floating plane rather than a solid cabinet. String has also built out the system over seventy-five years to cover far more than books. There are desks, vanities, coat hooks, magazine shelves, wardrobe components, and a dedicated kitchen collection. For clients building a home office or a dressing area rather than a bookcase, String is usually the answer.
What clients underestimate about String is how much the wire side panels do for a small room. They read as almost nothing against a white wall, so the books and objects become the storage, and the wall itself never feels full.
Jenna, Interior Design Specialist
The Cabinet with Sliding Doors is a useful entry point for clients who already know String but have never configured the system for themselves. It combines a piece of String furniture that reads as a standalone object with the option to expand into a full wall later. View the String Cabinet with Sliding Doors.
Muuto Stacked Storage System
The Stacked Storage System is Julien De Smedt's answer to the same problem Cadovius and Strinning solved seventy years earlier. De Smedt is a Brussels-born architect based in Copenhagen, and his solution ignores the rail-and-bracket tradition entirely. Stacked is a set of rectangular boxes in three sizes, small, medium, and large, held together by powder-coated steel clips with rubber inserts. No screws. No brackets. The modules clip to each other, and the resulting structure is freestanding or wall-mountable depending on how the owner chooses to arrange it.
De Smedt started with the medium module as a cube, then designed the small at exactly half the cube and the large at one and a half times the cube, so every size aligns dimensionally no matter how they are combined. A module with a closed back gives the shelf a backdrop. A module with a door gives it concealed storage. A podium or plinth raises the whole thing off the floor. Muuto also offers twenty-four pre-designed configurations for clients who want Stacked without doing the planning themselves, and a separate Mini Stacked line in a shallower depth for wall-mounted use in bedrooms, hallways, and home offices.
The Stacked clients we hear from most are the ones who have moved. Instead of buying new storage, they order a few more modules, reclip the system for the new wall, and the shelf they bought three years ago fits a room they did not own when they bought it.
Jenna, Interior Design Specialist
Planning a Stacked configuration from scratch takes a bit of visualization, especially at wall scale. Our design team walks clients through the module sizes, the clip logic, and the colour palette, and we configure it against the actual wall before the order goes in. Configure a Stacked Storage System with our design studio.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between a bookcase and a modular shelving system?
A bookcase is a fixed object. You buy it, you put it somewhere, and that is where it lives. A modular shelving system is a kit of parts. You decide how wide, how tall, how many shelves, how many cabinets, whether it runs the whole wall or just a corner, and you can reconfigure it later without replacing anything. Modular systems cost more upfront and last decades longer.
Do modular shelving systems have to be wall-mounted?
It depends on the system. Royal System is wall-mounted only, since the shelves hang off rails attached to the wall. String is wall-mounted in its original form, though String also produces floor-standing configurations. Stacked is the most flexible, since the modules can be stacked freestanding on a podium or plinth, or mounted to the wall with the same clip system.
Can I add to a modular shelving system later?
Yes, and this is the point of a modular system. String, Royal System, and Stacked are all designed so that components ordered years apart fit together. The only caveat is on Royal System, where the current dk3 production is not compatible with pre-1985 vintage pieces. New Royal System parts ordered today will be compatible with new Royal System parts ordered ten years from now.
Which modular shelving system is right for a small space?
For a smaller room, String is usually the cleanest answer because the wire side panels read as almost weightless on the wall. Muuto Mini Stacked, the shallower depth of the Stacked system, is also purpose-built for smaller rooms and mounts directly to the wall without a floor footprint. Royal System can work in a small room, but the full rail geometry is best suited to a wall where it has room to extend.
Three systems, three different answers to the same 1948 question. Royal System is the heritage piece: configure-to-order, built around the original Cadovius logic, and still the most architectural of the three on a wall. String is the visually lightest of the group, and the one with the widest range of uses beyond bookshelves. Stacked is the most open-ended, built to be arranged and rearranged by the person living with it. A reader who has read this far probably already knows which one belongs in their room.
If you want help building a configuration around the wall you actually have, our in-house design team works with clients across Canada on single-room layouts and full-home interior projects. We plan the rails, modules, clips, and finishes before the order goes in, which is the difference between a shelf that works and a shelf that has to be redone.
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