BH | Studio Pienza Grid-Front Sideboard

The sideboard's Italian name, credenza, recalls the Renaissance dining room, where a side cabinet held dishes before they reached the table. Pienza, rebuilt in the fifteenth century as an ideal town around an orderly piazza and measured façades, shows how deeply Italian design has always loved proportion. A calm grid of wood answers that taste, and the same quiet lattice runs through Japanese screens and modern cabinetmaking alike.

This long, low sideboard runs across four doors, each a frame of pale wood laid out in an even grid with a woven panel showing through every square. The doors open with a light press, so no handles break the pattern. The case is a wood frame faced in natural veneer. Behind the doors, fixed and adjustable shelves let you set the spacing for plates, tall glasses or tablecloths, and the top is rated to hold 276 lbs. It stands on a shallow recessed plinth with non-marking glides, and it needs to be assembled.

Run it along the dining room wall as the home for the good plates, serving bowls, glassware and table linen, so everything for a dinner is close at hand. In a hall it hides gloves, chargers and the dog's leash, and in a living room it holds records under a turntable. The pale grid front has a calm, Japanese-inflected look: style it with one ceramic vase, a low bonsai or a stack of linen-bound books and leave plenty of bare wood.