Bespoke Under Stairs Storage in Ashby-de-la-Zouch

Ashby-de-la-Zouch has a good number of character and period homes where the staircase sits within a wide, well-proportioned hall rather than a narrow corridor, and the cavity beneath it is often larger than in a more compact house. That extra volume is easy to waste on a shallow cupboard sized as if the space were smaller than it is. We survey the actual stair string and hall dimensions before drawing anything, so the design uses the space properly rather than conservatively.

Larger family houses in and around the town frequently go through an extension or renovation that reworks the ground floor, and the hallway is often the room that gets left until last, still holding whatever cupboard came with the house. Once the kitchen or living space either side of it has been finished to a higher standard, the under-stairs storage tends to stand out as the one area that has not kept pace, which is usually the point at which we are asked to look at it.

A dressing space or a home office fitted elsewhere in a larger house often calls for matching joinery in the hallway, particularly where the two rooms share a landing or sit close together on the plan. We coordinate panel details, timber species and hardware across both, so the under-stairs cupboard does not read as an unrelated, purely practical afterthought next to more considered cabinetry nearby.

Where a house has a chimney breast near the base of the stairs, the two features are often designed together rather than separately, since a run of cabinetry that continues past the chimney breast into the stair cavity can look more deliberate than two distinct pieces of joinery meeting at an odd angle. We take careful measurements of both elements before deciding how the run should be divided.

The cabinetry is made in our Derbyshire workshop from a template taken on site and installed by the team that designed it, so any final adjustment to an older wall or floor is handled by people who understand the original drawing.