Bespoke Room Dividers

Open-plan living and dining spaces are often generous in area but short on definition, with a kitchen, dining area and living room all reading as one undifferentiated room. A bespoke divider addresses that without resorting to a stud wall, using timber, shelving or cabinetry to suggest a boundary between two zones while keeping the space feeling connected rather than chopped up.

Slatted timber screens are one of the most effective ways to divide a space while still allowing light and a sense of what is happening on the other side to pass through. Vertical timber battens, spaced and sized to suit the room, give a strong directional pattern and enough visual weight to read as a genuine boundary, without the solidity of a full wall. We specify the slat width, spacing and depth to suit the ceiling height and the amount of separation actually wanted, since a denser screen reads much more like a wall than a loosely spaced one.

Open shelving and display cabinetry can do similar work from the other side, dividing a dining area from a living space while giving you somewhere to keep books, objects or crockery that are worth looking at from both sides. Because the piece is open rather than glazed or solid-fronted, light continues to pass through and neither room feels enclosed by it. Where some closed storage is also needed, sections of cabinetry with doors can sit within the same run, balanced against the open shelving so the piece does not become a solid block.

Partial-height furniture is often the better answer where full ceiling-height separation is not wanted, or where an existing sightline through the room needs to be kept for practical reasons — checking on children playing, for instance, or simply keeping a sense of scale in a large room. A run of cabinetry or a slatted screen stopping well short of the ceiling still marks a clear boundary at eye level while leaving the upper part of the room open and connected.

Home offices carved out of a corner of a living or dining space benefit particularly from this kind of partial division, since a run of slatted screen or open shelving can mark out a working area without the enclosed feeling of a fully partitioned room, and without sacrificing the natural light that a full wall would block.

We build every divider as freestanding or semi-fixed furniture rather than structural work, using the same slatted timber, open shelving and cabinetry construction found throughout our other fitted furniture. That keeps the approach consistent with everything else we build, rather than introducing a different type of joinery for the sake of one piece.

Part of our bespoke cabinetry collection