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The Tactile Cabinet: A Fridge that doesn’t look like one.
Refrigeration in the home is usually designed to disappear. Panelled into cabinetry, tucked out of sight, built to be forgotten. For Tactile Dialogues: Fragments of Matter, our Melbourne Design Week exhibition with principal partner Fisher & Paykel, we wanted to ask what happens when you do the opposite: build a piece of furniture that puts the appliance at its centre and treats it as something worth looking at.
The result is the Tactile Cabinet, a freestanding piece built around Fisher & Paykel's CoolDrawer, carved from American ash and finished entirely by hand. It's an exercise in the alchemy that only comes from a maker's hand: shaping with precision, while leaving room for play, imperfection and evolution.
From hand-carved prototype to full-scale piece
Nick began the design the way most Made By Morgen pieces start: small, and by hand. He carved a scaled prototype in our Brunswick workshop, working directly with the timber to find the rhythm, depth and movement of the surface before deciding whether it would hold up at full scale.
"I like to begin by making prototypes by hand. At a smaller scale, you can test an idea instinctively and understand how the form moves before committing to the full-size piece. The digital process then becomes a way of translating that handmade idea, rather than replacing it."
From there, our industrial designer Marinos Drakopoulos translated the prototype into a digital model that could be CNC-routed at full scale, carrying over the same irregularities Nick had carved by hand. The surface was then refined and finished by hand: a black finish that deepens the texture of the carving, with the feet left in a white-washed finish so the warmth of the ash still comes through underneath.
Prototype designed and fabricated by Made By Morgen - Photography Jack Lovel
Tactile Fridge Cabinet designed and fabricated by Made By Morgen - Photography Aaron Hargreaves
Materials and collaborators
A black glass top gives the cabinet a second life as a bar or display surface. The handle is hand-forged brass by Ned Vernon of V.BROKKR, its organic form set deliberately against the dark, carved timber. The CoolDrawer itself comes from Fisher & Paykel, principal partner of Tactile Dialogues: Fragments of Matter, and our second collaboration with the brand since we designed and built the Social Kitchen table for their Melbourne Experience Centre in 2023.
Where that piece created a setting for gathering and conversation, the Tactile Cabinet turns the same furniture-led thinking onto the appliance itself, keeping the cooling quietly integrated within the piece and free to be placed where life happens, rather than boxed into a fixed run of cabinetry.
See it in person
The Tactile Cabinet is currently on display for viewing at Made By Morgen's Brunswick showroom.
Available by commission
The Tactile Cabinet is available to commission. As with every piece we make, it can be adapted in dimensions, timber species, finish and appliance configuration to suit the space it's going into.
