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Wicked Hinges from Sugatsune

By Rain Noe - November 18, 2013

in Furniture Design | Homeware | Interior/Exhibition Design

If there's such a thing as a manufacturer's version of an otaku—someone who is fiendishly obsessed with one thing—it's gotta be Sugatsune. The Japanese company produces specialty hinges and closing mechanisms for all kinds of applications, and while that might not sound sexy, their Multiple Motion Sliding Door System that we looked at here remains the most innovative cabinet door solution we've ever seen.

If you think about it, standard out-swinging hinges aren't always the best solution, they're just the incumbent ones. Watch someone pushing a baby stroller and trying to enter a store, and witness how awkward it is—they must get close enough to the door to grab and pull the handle, but must then back up to let the door clear the stroller, then they have to squirt through the doorway and use their shoulder to prevent the door from closing on them. In instances like that, it would be better if there was a solution in place like Sugatsune's Lin-X Lateral Swing Hinge:

I realize that will probably never happen for interior doors, but at least they're making them for cabinets. Anyone in a wheelchair would probably appreciate not having to back themselves up just to swing a cabinet door open.I'm also totally in love with their Swing Lift Up Elan hinge, a sort of vertical version of the Lin-X:

Their LAD Lift Assist Damper system is for situations like those drawbridge-style deli counters:

And their MonoFlat Unison Flush Sliding Door System is just plain cool:

You can see videos of more of their systems here.

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greg

11 years ago

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toby,
if you take a very close look at approx 1:19 in the video, it looks like the hinges take up a maximum of a couple inches of depth at any given point in its swing. and their height is very shallow, so a center shelf would not be affected at all.
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Catharsis

11 years ago

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I like how fluidly these move, but I don't like the way the doors cover up nearby cabinets. That would make it really hard to transfer the contents of one cabinet into the cabinet next to it if rearranging.
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Toby

11 years ago

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The lateral cabinet hinges are very nice in action, but they appear to project quite deeply into the cabinets, unlike most ho-hum hinge designs. I'm not sure I'd want to trade storage capacity for the oohs and ahs of opening them...
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