Phone: 07919 448240
Phone: 07919 448240
When planning a home, it isn’t always the more obvious rooms – the kitchen, the sitting room, the bathroom etc – that gives us the functionality that makes a home work really well. I think the rooms you may not have, or actually the needs you have that aren’t catered for, that are the conundrums to be resolved. In an ideal world, and depending on your lifestyle, you might find a pantry, a boot room, a laundry room, a dressing room or a flower room incredibly useful. Of course, if you lust after all of these, you might also want a small army of Downton Abbey style staff to go with them but very often, the desire is not to have a room for each of these, but the space to accommodate the functionality or useful storage that each one provides.
A classic example of this, and one I find gets discussed all the time, is where do clothes hang to dry if you don’t want to tumble dry them and when hanging them outside isn’t feasible? There so often isn’t a good space and thus an overflowing clothes maid sits in a dining room or spare bedroom which slightly spoils the look of the room and isn’t the logical place for them to be anyway. The ideal would be a laundry room with washing machine and tumble dryer plus space to do ironing and to dry clothes, that isn’t miles away from bedrooms or bathrooms where dirty linen is generated and where clean linen returns to.
A friend of mine recently said to me, only semi-jokingly, that it was the walk-in linen cupboard on the first floor landing of her beautiful three storey period house that was the main reason she wanted the house when she first saw it. It is a beauty. It is not huge but it is wide enough to have slim shelves on either side and deep enough to step into. It has a central pendant light and everything is painted in the same warm off white paint colour. It is beautifully functional and with the shelves stacked high with folded laundered linen, it is all that you could possibly want in a linen cupboard.
Personally, I have quite a strong dislike of a bedroom filled with too many prominent wardrobes. I think they detract significantly from the possibly of a calm sleeping environment and aren’t an ideal way to know what you actually have in terms of clothing. When we recently moved to our new house, the master bedroom had a wall-to-wall row of well-built wardrobes. I knew immediately that I wanted to remove them all but in order to get the decision agreed, I had to get my argument for doing this straight, and an optimal storage solution ready as my husband and I both have too many clothes. We have resolved this, after negotiation, by moving the bathroom into one of the bedrooms and making the old pokey shower room into a walk in wardrobe. It is a luxurious move as we do sacrifice a bedroom but I think it makes the first floor part of the house function so much better. The master bedroom is also now very nice and really rather spacious.
I could go on. There are very many attributes to these rooms and if you spend any amount of time in National Trust properties, you will see great examples of all of them. But what do you do if you don’t have these spaces but you still desire the wonderful functionality they provide? I think there are often solutions to be found, if your needs are properly analysed. For example, many Victorian terraced houses have narrow front hallways that are the main entrance into and out of the property and this space can so quickly be overwhelmed with coats, bags and clutter which doesn’t look great and can quickly stop functioning well once the space is overfull. Assuming you don’t have a capacious boot room somewhere, the thing to do is work out which items really do have to be right by the front door – which may be truly everyday items and possibly guest coats – and think about how best to store these. Then think about where the stuff goes that could live further into the house – a cupboard in the sitting room or kitchen, or on a landing? A shoe rack under the stairs? It’s better if all these items can be stored together near to an exterior door, but if that isn’t possible, try to work out how close to this ideal you can get to.
One word of warning I would mention is about the handy utility room. Many modern houses have these and of course the additional space is marvellous. Regularly they are found leading off the kitchen, have a door to the outside and the washing machine and sometimes tumble dryer installed. I think the trick with a utility room, particularly a smaller one which they often are, is to not try to make it do all things. So often, a utility room involves laundry and also going into and out of the house with wet, muddy clothes/dogs (not a good combination) but can also be an overflow from the kitchen for storing food and appliances or even gardening items. I would focus on which job this room could do best, and design it for that, and then think about where else other things could take place.
Once you start thinking about it, the functionality provided by the clever little rooms that were once included in the servants quarters of a large house – a scullery or pantry off a kitchen; a butler’s pantry storing ‘best’ china and glasses; a flower room for bringing flowers and vegetables into a home – is often still very relevant in the modern home, but not really thought about. I think these needs can be addressed even if you don’t have the room in question, but some clever thinking is often what is required.
© Angel + Blume
