In this guide
- Why Does Standard Furniture Fail in These Rooms?
- How Do You Use a Room With a Sloping Ceiling?
- What Can Be Done With a Box Room Over the Stairs?
- Are Chimney Breast Alcoves Really Not Symmetrical?
- What About Bay Windows, Radiators and Doors in the Wrong Place?
- Is Bespoke Furniture Worth It for a Small Room?
- Where to Start
Most homes have at least one space that defeats ordinary furniture. A loft room where you cannot stand up at the edges. A box room mostly occupied by the stairs. Two alcoves that look like a pair and are not. These are the rooms we are called out to most.
Why Does Standard Furniture Fail in These Rooms?
Because it is built to fixed sizes for square rooms, and these rooms are neither.
A flat pack wardrobe is a rectangle. Put it under a sloping ceiling and it only fits where the ceiling is at full height, which wastes everything beyond. Put it in an alcove and the gap down one side gets filled with a strip of trim. The furniture is not badly made. It is simply solving a different problem from the one your room presents.
Made to measure furniture starts from the room. That is the whole difference.
How Do You Use a Room With a Sloping Ceiling?
Follow the roof line rather than fighting it. The usable height changes across the floor, so the furniture should change with it.
In practice that means full height hanging on the tall side where you can stand comfortably, and drawers, pull out shoe storage or low cupboards pushed right into the eaves where you cannot. The low space is not wasted, it is simply used for things you do not need to stand in front of.
One detail worth knowing: eaves storage is far more useful on pull out runners than behind a hinged door. Reaching into a dark triangular void is unpleasant, and anything at the back never gets used. Pulling the whole drawer out into the room solves it entirely.
What Can Be Done With a Box Room Over the Stairs?
Build over the bulkhead rather than around it. Of everything we do in a box room, this is the one that makes the biggest difference.
The stair bulkhead typically takes up a third of the floor of a third bedroom, and because it is at knee to waist height it renders that whole area useless for ordinary furniture. The room ends up fitting a single bed and nothing else.
A raised platform bed built over the bulkhead uses the height that is otherwise dead. Underneath, on the side where the bulkhead is lower, you get hanging space and drawers. The room goes from a box that barely takes a bed to a proper bedroom with real storage. It is the job we are asked about most often and the one people are most surprised by.
Are Chimney Breast Alcoves Really Not Symmetrical?
Almost never. In our experience the two alcoves either side of a chimney breast differ by anything from a few millimetres to several centimetres.
That is why a matched pair of shop bought units always gives itself away. One side sits flush and the other has a gap, or both have been packed out with filler strips. We measure each recess separately, and at more than one height, because the walls usually lean as well as being different widths.
It is also worth checking whether the chimney breast has been removed upstairs but not downstairs, which is common. That leaves a stepped wall that needs designing around rather than ignoring.
What About Bay Windows, Radiators and Doors in the Wrong Place?
All of them are workable, and all of them need deciding at design stage rather than on fitting day.
- Bay windows. Full height units on the returns either side, with a low run or window seat across the bay. The light is kept and the wall gets used.
- Radiators. Either designed around with a ventilated cover, or relocated. Boxing a radiator in without ventilation makes the room colder, so it has to be done properly.
- Doors that open into the only clear wall. Sliding wardrobe doors remove the conflict entirely, since nothing needs clearance to open.
Is Bespoke Furniture Worth It for a Small Room?
Small awkward rooms are where it makes the biggest difference, not the smallest.
In a large square bedroom, freestanding furniture works perfectly well and costs less. The gap between made to measure and off the shelf is narrow there. In a box room or a loft room, off the shelf furniture either does not fit at all or wastes half the space, so the comparison is not really about cost per unit. It is about whether the room becomes usable.
Where to Start
For loft bedrooms specifically, our fitted bedroom furniture guide goes further on hanging and drawer planning, and if the awkward space is destined to be a study, see how to plan a fitted home office.
If you have a room you have given up on, it is worth having someone measure it properly before assuming nothing will work. In our experience something almost always will, and it is usually less complicated than people expect.
See our tricky spaces page for examples, our under stairs storage for the hallway equivalent, or book a free design visit and we will come and look at the room.
