The Rooms That Came Without A Name
Every other space in your house arrived with a name on it. Kitchen, lounge, bed 1, bed 2, and everybody knew what to do with them before the removal van left.
Three did not. The box room, the landing and the cupboard under the stairs came with no label, no obvious purpose and no decision attached, and by March all three are full of boxes. Not because anyone chose that. Because nobody chose anything, and an unnamed space fills up on its own.
The useful thing to know is that one of the three should absolutely be storage, and working out which one is what frees the other two.
What to put in the understairs cupboard
Start here, because this is the one that takes the boxes and the one people use worst.
Your house has nowhere else. The roof is trussed and not designed to be stored in, there is no cellar, no chimney breasts, no eaves cupboards and no awkward Victorian half landing with a door in it. The volume under the stairs is the only real storage in the building, which makes it more important than its size suggests.
Three things change it.
Put a light in it. A cupboard you cannot see into is a cupboard things go into to be forgotten, and most new build understairs have a pull cord at best. A stick-on LED strip or a motion sensor puck costs very little, needs no electrician, and is the single change that makes the space usable.
Work with the slope instead of against it. The cupboard is tall at the front and almost flat at the back, so the instinct to stack boxes in the middle is exactly wrong. It builds a wall across the useful part and wastes both ends. Shelves at the tall end, floor to head height, for the things you reach for weekly. Long flat items slid down the slope at the back, which is where the airer, the ironing board and the Christmas tree live. Hooks screwed into the underside of the treads for bags, the hoover attachments and coats nobody wears.
Keep the meters and the consumer unit clear. They are usually in there, somebody will need to get to them, and it will always be the week the cupboard is at its worst.
What should not be in there is anything you use less than once a year. In a house with no loft, that is not a storage question, it is a question of whether it should be in the house at all.
What to do with a new build box room
Now the argument. Office or guest room, and in most houses two people want different answers.
Be honest about the maths. A guest bed is slept in a handful of nights a year and occupies the room for the other three hundred and fifty. A double is 135 wide, a small double 120, and either one in a third bedroom leaves a strip of floor and nowhere to put a desk that is not jammed against a wall you cannot walk past.
So pick the use that covers fifty one weeks, and solve the guest nights separately. A good folding bed or an air bed lives under the stairs, which is what you have just made room for.
Then let the room tell you the rest. Every box room has exactly one wall long enough to take something, and it is the wall with no door swing, no window and no radiator on it. Measure it before you buy anything. Whatever goes on that wall is what the room is, which is the same principle as where the sofa goes deciding the living room, just with less room to be wrong in.
One correction worth making while you are at it. The instinct is to put the desk under the window, and it is usually the worst place for it, because you spend the day looking at a screen with the light behind it. Desk on the long wall, side on to the window.
What to do with the landing
The landing is not a room, and most of the trouble comes from treating it like one.
It is four or five doors, a stair rail, one window if the layout was kind, and the first thing you see when you reach the top of the stairs. It cannot take furniture. Anything that narrows the walk between the bedrooms and the stairs is in the way, and it is also the route everyone takes out of the house in a hurry.
What it takes is light and one thing to look at.
The light first. A landing lit only by the pendant in the middle of the ceiling is the flattest space in the house, and the same problem as everywhere else with none of the room to fix it. A plug-in wall light, or a lamp on the windowsill if there is one, changes it completely and costs nothing in floor space.
Then one object, on the wall you face at the top of the stairs. A large piece of art, a mirror if the landing is dark, hung lower than instinct says. Not a gallery of small frames down the length of it, which reads as clutter in a corridor you walk through six times a day.
A runner helps too, for warmth underfoot and for the noise, which on a new build staircase is more than you would expect.
Name them and they stop filling up
That is the whole of it. The floorplan did not name these three, so you do.
The cupboard is storage, properly fitted out and lit. The box room is one thing, chosen deliberately, with the guest bed living somewhere else. The landing is a way through with good light and one thing worth looking at. Do that and you get a house with three more rooms in it than you had in March, without moving a single wall.
Send us your floorplan
Design Seven is a Bristol studio. Most of our work is show homes for housebuilders, which means we furnish empty new builds for a living. We take on private projects too, whether that is a single room, a whole house, or curtains, blinds and lighting measured and fitted properly. We are based between Bristol and Bath, and work across the South West and further afield where the project warrants it.
Send us the floorplan your developer gave you. Everybody still has the PDF, it takes ten seconds, and it tells us more than photographs would. Tell us which room is the box room and whether the guest nights are a real requirement or a habit.
We will tell you which of your three unnamed spaces should be the storage one in that particular layout, what the box room can realistically be given the wall lengths, and what we would put on the landing.
Call 0117 450 6707, email info@designseven.co.uk, or use the form on our contact page.