Lelukaappi is a mobile and multifunctional toy chest designed by Enric Miralles in 1995 for the children’s toy library at the Mollet Civic Centre, near Barcelona. Commissioned in conjunction with an exhibition at the Alvar Aalto Museum, the piece explores the architectural potential of furniture as both spatial and temporal experience. The name, Lelukaappi Finnish for “toy cupboard” – inspired the poetic qualities embedded in the design.
More than just storage, Lelukaappi is a hybrid between furniture and play-object. It unfolds, opens, and closes, transforming itself into multiple configurations: a container, a mountain, a stage, a shelter. The dynamic nature of the piece invites children to interact with it intuitively, allowing it to serve as both object and space. As such, it embodies the same conceptual principles as Miralles’ InesTable, another furniture-work that functions as a room within a room.
Designed to adapt to various positions in a room, Lelukaappi is constructed to be durable and mobile, facilitating continuous transformation and reinterpretation. Its theatrical and narrative qualities turn it into an inhabited element, where the boundaries between architecture, design, and storytelling dissolve.
Miralles envisioned this object not merely as furniture, but as a living component of children’s environments suggesting that architecture, even at a domestic scale, can become a generator of moments, memories, and imagination.
