Corniches arose from the need for small impromptu storage spaces for miscellaneous items. ‘The same way that we hang our belongings on a rock jutting from a cliff before diving into the sea, we need small, informal storage in everyday life too’, explains Ronan Bouroullec. And this is the reason that Corniches are neither regular shelves nor simple horizontal surfaces, but rather individual, isolated protrusions in the environments that we create.