Well worth the price! Gorgeous, sturdy, definitely real (plantation) teak!
I have had my eye on these shelves for awhile, but I mostly buy bamboo shelves, which are lightweight, cheap, and remarkably sturdy—especially compared to the engineered wood crap that dominates the cheap bookshelf market. Given that I could get four times the storage capacity in bamboo shelves for half the price, I always put off actually buying these shelves until I decided I wanted to shelves on a little bit of unused wall space they looked perfect for. It turns out I was off by a few inches, but these shelves still exceeded my expectations, and I am absolutely keeping them. In fact, I'm looking around my house now and wondering if there is anywhere else I could fit another set of shelves like this. I think I need to acknowledge the difference between plantation and old-growth teak. I have an heirloom teak chair from my grandfather that is old-growth teak, and it is extremely dense, so I was shocked by how light these shelves felt. But for the purpose of a bookshelf, they are still plenty sturdy. Not only are the slats of a generous thickness, but they are reinforced on the bottom, as I illustrate in my photograph. Unlike the shelves that I bought after these to actually fit that wall space, these are unquestionably genuine teak. Not only do they come with a little certification thing from the Indonesian government certifying that they are sustainable plantation teak, but they have a distinct basmati rice-like smell that now permeates the entire room. This is also some of the easiest assembly I've ever had when it comes to flat-pack furniture—especially a good thing given they came with the instructions for a shower chair instead of for the shelves! The shelves fit together with the side pieces through hand-carved mortise-and-tenon joints, so you can put it all together before you screw everything in place, and the holes all seem to be perfectly aligned. I think I probably put these together in under ten minutes, maybe five. The pattern of the shelves looks even better in person than in the pictures, IMO—in person you can see the woodgrain variations that don't show up very well in photos. (My own picture is to show the reinforcements on the underside and I didn't bother about lighting, so the picture is taken with flash: they are much more of an attractive reddish color in real life.) I am using these as bookshelves rather than bathroom shelves, and pushing all the books to the back, since only two of the shelves have sidebars to keep them falling off. This leaves a remarkable amount of space on the shelves in front of the books that I can basically use as a kind of nightstand, although I've been trying to keep it empty because it's nice to just look at the beautiful patterns. Read more
