Metro: the same steel wire in a hospital sterile room and a Chicago wine store

Metro organises its catalogue around three worlds, foodservice, healthcare and science & industrial, and the same wire shelving runs through all of them. A rack that holds trays in a hotel kitchen holds surgical instruments in a sterile processing department and holds bottles in a wine store in Chicago; the InterMetro brochure shows it in a Milan library, a London architecture studio, a flower shop in New York and a general store in San Francisco. That breadth is not marketing. It is what happens when a product designed in the 1950s for the hardest rooms in a building turns out to work in the easy ones too.

For a British office, studio or shop it means a storage system that was tested somewhere tougher before it arrived: open wire that keeps dust from settling, chrome or Metroseal finishes chosen by room, casters where the layout changes, accessories that make a bench or a display out of a storage bay. The families are Erecta and Super Erecta, with polymer, wall-mounted and track versions behind them. La Mercanti supplies Metro from Italy to the UK, configured on the floor plan and delivered with the fittings for the floor it stands on. What the sterile room and the wine store have in common, it turns out, is the shelf.