Stephen Coles
Here’s an original Boby Cart on eBay. Joe Colombo’s 1970 design for Bieffeplast has won many awards and is in the permanent collection at the MOMA. I love its combination of versatility and economy of space. Up to 3 units can be stacked for more storage. B-line (a licensed manufacturer who also created a contemporary takeoff called Spinny) makes it in four colors: red, orange, white, and black. The new pieces go for $250–$500.
Design Museum says:
Rather than simply modernising existing types of furniture, Colombo was intent on reinventing them as new concepts which would be better suited to a mobile, fluid late 1960s lifestyle. One of his obsessions was storage. As early as 1963 he had designed a Combi-Centre container consisting of cylindrical units to store books, drinks or tools, which slot on top of each other in a wheeled unit. The following year he produced the Man-Woman Container, a futuristic version of a 19th century trunk, in which rails, shelves, drawers and mirrors are stashed inside two cupboards: one for a man, the other for a woman. These experiments culminated in the 1970 Boby trolley, a mobile ABS unit of rotating drawers and shelves, which is still in production today.
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