Restaurants in NYC provide lots of affordable, interior design inspiration. Because restaurant owners are very driven to do beautiful work and keep their costs down, they often come up with ingenious and cheap solutions. Here are two beautiful shelving solutions that I collected recently...

This first one is from a brand new restaurant called I Sodi. While I've seen marble used in counter tops and wood used in shelving, I've never seen wood braces supporting thick slabs of creamy marble to make shelves.

The genius here is that Carrera marble is much more affordable than other kinds of marble and if you purchase only one slab, you get many shelves out of it. The wood is also very rustic and noticeable, which makes for a strong contrast.

I particularly like the design touches in rounding the marble corners and the inside of the wood supports. The curves echo one another and soften the large, blocky, raw textures. The shelves at I Sodi were designed and built by Daskam and Dworkis.

This shelving is from a restaurant called Market Table. Here, thick, smooth slabs of wood are used for the shelving and simple angle irons are welded together to form the supports.

The metal has kept its black, raw coloring and they've used it not only for long runs of deep shelving along the far wall, but also to build upright shelving in the doorway to the other room. In other words, the angle iron has become a design element that carries through the restaurant (and what could be cheaper?).

Oh, and did I mention that both of these solutions are supremely strong? No worries here about putting too many books in your library. Enjoy!