STYLE : DESIGN : Rack ‘Em Up

At first, you keep them in stacks. Then the stacks become rows, and then the rows take over the bookcase. And pretty soon, you’re looking for storage units to house all the CDs in your music collection. Plastic and black metal have been your choices until recently. Now CD racks are fashioned from aluminum, steel and exotic woods. Some storage towers sport bases of marble and tops shaped like fanciful pianists or heraldic banners. Others are made of woods with beautiful grains or industrial-cut aluminum that resembles giant combs. Artist Aidan Bird’s aluminum “Birdrax” CD tower is so graceful that one interior designer purchased it for use strictly as sculpture rather than storage. Says Bird: “People spend a couple of thousand dollars on CDs--they might as well have a nice thing to show them off.”