Stow Away

“My mom,” he says, laughing, “would always say, ‘Maxwell, please stow your things!”

The nautical lingo came to mind when, during his senior year at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Kelsey sought a name for a squat, wooden media cabinet he planned to enter in the annual MCAD/Room & Board Design Competition. Last April, a panel of R&B execs unanimously selected his design from a field of fifteen entries. They were so impressed, they opted to produce the cabinet, and in January, it appeared in R&B catalogs and show rooms across the country.

The four-year-old contest introduces MCAD’s furniture design students to real-world concerns of production and marketing, explains MCAD professor of furniture design Dean Wilson. Based on an R&B–chosen theme, students create furniture designs to pitch to the company in a professional setting. While past contests have highlighted the too-often-overlooked talent of MCAD students, Kelsey’s is the first piece that R&B has actually brought into production.

After graduating from MCAD in the spring of 2005, Kelsey moved his work to a small Northeast Minneapolis studio. The Stow is selling well, and while Kelsey does not profit from the piece (he received a $1,000 scholarship), his success in the competition has strengthened his passion for design. His enthusiasm is evident in the way he discusses his craft—like a freight train acquiring speed, he tends to start slowly and build to a feverish stutter. “I think of furniture design as architecture on a small scale,” he explains. “Architecture is in everything—it’s how things are mapped out. It’s in the sewing of your shirt, in a computer chip. In electronics. Drawings! Graffiti!”

Kelsey describes himself as a neomodernist, and his recent projects involve creative uses of low-grade materials and found objects. While he hopes to someday take on large-scale architectural work, he is currently soliciting clients for work on commercial and retail space.

Stow is available at Room & Board. 7010 France Ave. S., Edina, 952-927-8835