Shopping Cart Chaise Lounge

This is the Shopping Cart Chaise Lounge created for my furniture design class at AIPD which was taught by John Brehm. The assignment was to use a recycled or re-purposed material and use it as the major structural element of a piece of furniture. We began developing 3 concepts by sketching and making scale models. Then we chose one of the 3 designs to develop in to a 1/3 scale, then 1/2 scale, and finally a full scale prototype. We were also to include basic construction drawings detailing the locations where the repurposed material was fastened to any added material.

My repurposed item was a metal shopping cart, and Albertson's grocery was kind enough to donate 3 junked up old shopping carts. During the original concepting stage I had not yet acquired the shopping cart, so while it was good exercise I really didn't have anything that ended up relating to the final product. I spent several hours on this early design phase and I think that had I acquired the cart from the beginning I would have been able to be much more productive in these initial studies.

When I finally acquired the shopping carts I took them to my friend Will Lolcama's shop, Studio Concepts. After a design phase of 10 minutes of sketching and staring at the cart we knew we were on to something with an entirely new concept, the chaise lounge, and we got right to work. Will is an accomplished welder and metal worker so he guided and instructed me in the techniques of construction. We both took turns welding and chopping the cart. One word of advice for anyone who plans to weld or heat shopping carts or anything that has been chromed: Chrome is really toxic and nasty stuff and proper ventilation and respiration masks should definitely be used.

The whole process from here happened really organically. Will and I have very fluid communication and we bounced ideas back and forth rapidly coming up with many design solutions on the fly. We produced one full size prototype which you can see in the pictures below that is just rails.

On the second and final trip we created a new full scale piece with 3/4" marine grade plywood slats spaced evenly across the rails. One challenge we came across was fastening the slats to the metal seat rails. After much deliberation and some frustrating moments trying to drill around the handrails and in to the seat rails directly below, Will came up with the ingenious idea of welding individual hex nuts to the inside of the seat rails and using them to hold wood screws in place that were then drilled in to the underside of the wood. You can see the detail in the construction drawings. In further versions of this chair we would probably want to bolt all the way through the wood, but with the resources we had this was the best solution and also very attractive for presentation as the screws did not penetrate the top surface of the wood slats.

All of the drafting and 3D computer models were created in Rhino and the construction documents were then edited in Adobe Illustrator. The Shopping Cart Chaise Lounge was designed and constructed by Tobias Berblinger and Will Lolcama. All construction of the full scale prototype and fullscale model took place at Studio Concepts, Inc. The shopping carts were generously donated by Albertsons.