PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT
The String Pocket is a compact wall shelf from String Furniture: two steel wire side panels, three shelves, 23.6" wide and 5.9" deep. It arrives complete in one box, mounts with a handful of screws, and then spends the next few decades holding whatever phase of your life you are in.
Most people meet String Furniture through the Pocket. It is usually the first String piece they bring home, and before long other areas of the home start getting the String treatment, a second Pocket in the kitchen, a full String System wall in the office. The design turned twenty in 2025, and its story starts in 1949.
The Last Design in a Seventy-Year Story
In 1949, the architect Nisse Strinning won a Swedish competition for an affordable, transportable bookshelf with a design built on an element pared down to almost nothing: a ladder of thin steel wire that serves as the side wall, with shelves resting on the rungs. The String shelf went on to furnish homes, libraries, and offices across Scandinavia and well beyond.
The Pocket came more than five decades later, in 2005, and String Furniture describes it as Strinning's final contribution to the String legacy. It takes the 1949 construction, the wire ladder panel and the resting shelf, and packages it as one complete, ready-to-hang unit.
The proportions are fixed and carefully judged, wide enough for a run of novels, shallow enough that it never crowds a hallway or a narrow room. Strinning drew a shelf that could hang in any home he could think of, and twenty years of installations have proven him right.
Two Panels, Three Shelves
The Pocket measures 23.6" wide, 19.7" high, and 5.9" deep. The wire panels mount directly to the wall, and the shelves rest on the rungs, which means you can shift them to different heights or lift one out entirely whenever what you are storing changes. A shelf of paperbacks one year becomes a shelf of glassware or a child's picture books the next, with no tools involved.
The wire panel is also why the Pocket photographs the way it does. Loaded, the shelf visually disappears and the objects take over. Empty, it reads as a light pencil sketch on the wall. The Pocket carries both states well because the structure is barely there to begin with.
The strongest installations we see rarely stop at one. Two Pockets stacked with a gap between them turn a bare wall into a composition, and three in an offset grid will carry an entire home office. Because each unit is complete in itself, the collection can grow one box at a time, which is the same logic that has kept the larger String System growing in Canadian homes for years.
The Wood Versions
The classic Pocket pairs lacquered or veneered shelves with colour-matched or contrasting wire panels. White with oak shelves is the version most people picture, and it stays luminous in the low winter light Canadian rooms spend half the year in. Walnut with black panels goes the other way, reading as a dark graphic frame that flatters brass objects, ceramics, and anything with age to it.
New for 2026 is Dark Oak with dark brown panels, part of the same darker direction String introduced across the String System last spring. It is the finish we would point to for a room that already leans warm, wood tones, aged leather, low light in the evenings. Black stained ash and pale ash round out the range, and every combination is on the String Pocket product page.
The Metal Pocket
In 2020, String Furniture asked the Swedish designers Anna von Schewen and Björn Dahlström to rebuild the Pocket entirely in powder-coated steel. Their version keeps the proportions and rebuilds every part in steel, with perforated shelves in place of wood. The perforations are functional: hooks slip into them, so towels, utensils, and oven mitts can hang below a shelf of jars or plants.
That detail makes the Metal Pocket at home in kitchens, bathrooms, and entryways, the rooms where a shelf works for a living. Powder-coated steel shrugs off the steam and splashes those rooms produce.
For the Pocket's twentieth anniversary in 2025, String released a set of colours named for Stockholm landmarks. Oxtorgsröd is a deep red drawn from Oxtorget, a square ringed by 1920s functionalist buildings, and Sergelgrå is a grey taken from the geometric tiles of Sergels torg. Both are available on the String Pocket Metal page alongside white, and the Oxtorgsröd in particular gives a small wall more presence than its 23.6" suggests.
A Shelf for the Walls You Forgot You Had
The Pocket thrives on the walls that never get furniture. The strip between two windows, the end of a galley kitchen, the wall above a desk or a crib, the powder room that needs one shelf and has room for exactly one. Its 5.9" depth is matched to paperbacks, spice jars, small plants, and leaned photographs, which covers most of what those walls are asked to hold.
If you are hanging one above a desk, mount it lower than instinct suggests, with the bottom shelf about 12" off the work surface. Everything on it stays within reach while you sit, and the shelf becomes part of the workspace.
Twenty years in, the String Pocket is still in production, still complete in one box, and still multiplying across the walls of the homes that start with one. Whether that means a Dark Oak unit over a desk or Oxtorgsröd metal in the kitchen, it is the simplest place to start with String Furniture. The full range of shelves, cabinets, and systems is in our String Furniture collection.
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