The Rooms Nobody Used to Think About
For a long time, there was a fairly predictable hierarchy when it came to designing a home.
The kitchen mattered.
The living room mattered.
Perhaps the principal bedroom and bathroom mattered a bit too.
And then there were all the other rooms.
The utility room was somewhere to put the washing machine - if we even had one. A home office might have been a desk squeezed into a spare bedroom. Coats and muddy boots accumulated somewhere near the back door, or front door, the outside porch … or the floor. Dressing rooms belonged to hotels and very large houses, while a home bar was something of an extravagance.
That has changed.
Increasingly, some of the most interesting spaces we are asked to create are the rooms that, not very long ago, nobody thought very much about at all.
The practical rooms have become part of the design
There is something rather lovely about a beautifully considered boot room.
It doesn't need to be enormous but it does need to work. What matters is that it has been designed around the people who actually live there: somewhere for coats, somewhere for shoes, somewhere to sit down, cupboards for the things you don't necessarily want on display and, quite often, somewhere to deal with the dog after a particularly muddy Kent walk.
The same is true of utility rooms. My most-used room.
Once treated almost entirely as functional spaces, they are now being designed with the same attention to cabinetry, materials and detail as the kitchen next door. Tall storage, laundry cupboards, concealed appliances, sinks, work surfaces and carefully planned internal storage can transform a room that is used every day. And, for busy families, they are used every day.
Perhaps that is precisely why these spaces deserve more thought.
They may not be the rooms guests see first, but they are often the rooms that make a house easier to live in.
A place for everything
Good bespoke joinery is not simply about filling a wall with cupboards.
It starts with understanding what needs to happen in a room.
In a dressing room, that might mean thinking about the length of hanging space required, shoes, bags, watches and jewellery, mirrors, lighting and the inevitable collection of things that don't fit neatly into a standard wardrobe.
In a home office, the questions are completely different. Where will screens sit? What needs to be hidden? Are there files, printers or equipment to accommodate? Does the room need to work for one person or two? And, importantly, does it still need to feel like part of the home rather than an office that happens to be inside one?
These are small decisions individually, but collectively they determine whether a room simply looks good in photographs or genuinely works.
And then there are the rooms that are simply for enjoyment
Not every piece of cabinetry has to solve a storage problem.
We are designing more bars, drinks cabinets and entertaining spaces within homes too. And while the home bar may once have conjured up images of Pamela-ah and Mick Shipman enthusiastically offering everyone a drink from behind theirs, it has had something of a design renaissance.
Today's versions can be beautifully understated — sometimes forming part of a kitchen or living space, sometimes having a room of their own. They might house a wine collection, glassware, a coffee machine or a favourite bottle that deserves rather better than the back of a cupboard.
Although, if you do want somewhere from which to announce “Drinks?” to everyone who walks through the door, we are absolutely not going to judge!
These spaces allow for a little more personality. I love the Shipmans.
Timber, metalwork, lighting, stone, glass and colour can all be used differently here. They can be quieter and understated or deliberately theatrical.
And because they are made specifically for the house and the people living in it, they don't need to follow a prescribed idea of what a 'home bar' or drinks cabinet should look like.
Designing the house as a whole
Perhaps the biggest change we are seeing is that these rooms are no longer being considered independently.
When we are involved in a new build or substantial renovation, there is an opportunity to think about the joinery throughout the property from the beginning.
The kitchen can relate to the utility and boot room. Materials or details can reappear elsewhere without every room becoming identical. A particular timber might continue into the study. Cabinetry in a dressing room might reference something used downstairs. A bar can feel entirely different while still belonging to the same house.
There is a balance to it.
A home shouldn't feel as though somebody has copied and pasted the same cabinetry into every room. Equally, the spaces shouldn't feel as though they were designed by completely different people with no conversation between them.
That continuity is one of the reasons we enjoy working across an entire property.
It allows us to think beyond individual pieces of furniture and consider how the house works as a whole.
The rooms that make a home work
Kitchens will probably always command a great deal of attention. They are important rooms and, for many families, still the centre of the home.
But they are only part of it.
The boot room that stops coats appearing on every available chair. The utility that contains the laundry. The dressing room where everything actually has somewhere to go. The office that makes working from home enjoyable. The bar where friends inevitably congregate at the end of an evening.
These aren't secondary spaces anymore.
In many of the homes we work on, they're becoming some of the most considered rooms in the house.
And we rather like that.
