German Oak Stockroom Bank of Drawers, 1950s

1950’s Original German Oak Stockroom Bank Of Drawers. We found three of these banks of drawers in an old German hardware merchant, this listing is for one set of drawers. Beautifully made with solid pitch pine carcasses with finger jointed construction. The drawers are then made in solid pitch pine and the drawers fronts are solid oak throughout. The cabinets have a number of incredible features that were built in by a very logical crafts person. Firstly, the drawer slots that house the drawers do not have dividers and the design of the drawer width comes in a multiple of the smallest drawer, so basically the drawers have a number of combinations (3 across/5 across and so on) and can slot in most shelves, to give maximum flexibility. We assume the idea behind this is to be able to swap the drawers around easily, perhaps to put best sellers on the top shelf or simply to allow better grouping of like products, we haven’t seen this before and it is genius. But, the greatest feature is the round metal stock control tags, white on one side, red on the other. We assume the system was that when a product was out of stock a tag was taken from it’s storage place inside the drawer and slotted on to the handle, ‘red’ meaning out of stock and needs to be ordered, then when ordered, flip the tag over and white meaning ‘on order’. When fully in stock the tags were simply put back in the internal drawer holding slot. The handles were specially made so the tags could slip on and off as the handle diameter tapers to allow the tag on and off. The cabinet comes with a few surviving metal discs and a number of Bakelite drawer containers.