Bespoke Under Stairs Storage, Made to Measure in London

A typical London staircase conceals six to eight cubic metres of usable volume, enough for any of four common briefs: a display and storage unit for a hallway, a wall of deep pull-out drawers, a walk-in room such as a pantry or wine store, or a compact home office with a pull-out desk that closes flush. Most commissions are one of these or a hybrid of two.

Every under-stairs commission is priced individually, because staircase geometry drives the cost far more than floor area does. A straightforward display and storage unit sits at the lower end, with pull-out drawer stacks and compact home offices above it. Walk-in pantries, boot rooms and wine stores sit higher again, and temperature-controlled wine cellars with bespoke racking and glass doors are the most involved of all. Every price is fixed in writing after a free home visit.

Under a staircase, off-the-shelf is rarely a real option. Every staircase has a different pitch, stringer depth and headroom, so standard cupboards leave triangular voids that get boarded over — which is where most of the volume is lost. Bespoke joinery follows the stair line exactly, and the difference in usable storage is usually the whole point of doing the work at all.

Significantly. A straight-run staircase, typical of Victorian terraces, gives the longest and most usable void and suits almost any brief. A half-landing staircase gives two smaller separate zones. Spiral and quarter-turn staircases create awkward triangular pockets that work well for display and shallow storage but rarely allow a walk-in room. Your designer assesses your specific geometry during the visit.

No — a walk-in needs at least 1.5m of standing height at the tall end of the void, which is roughly the first three or four steps. Most straight-run staircases in Victorian and Edwardian London terraces meet this comfortably. Half-landing and quarter-turn staircases need assessing in person, because the usable headroom is much harder to judge from a photograph.

A wine store is straightforward joinery; a temperature-controlled cellar with refrigeration brings electrical and ventilation regulations into scope, and we coordinate with a qualified electrician. A WC under the stairs is different work — it needs drainage, ventilation and Building Regulations approval, and is a plumbing and building project rather than a joinery one. We'd build the joinery around a WC someone else installs.

The staircase itself is structural, and its stringers, treads and any supporting posts cannot be altered without proper structural input — we never modify them. Everything we build sits inside the existing void. Where the area has previously been boxed in with plasterboard, we usually remove and reinstate that boarding to reach the full geometry, and we board and dust-seal any raw brick or open studwork first.

At the low end of the run, where door height drops below roughly 600mm, conventional handles become awkward to reach and to grip. We specify push-to-open touch latches or recessed finger-pulls in that zone, and use conventional cup handles or bar pulls where door height allows. Mixing the two along a single run is normal and reads as deliberate rather than inconsistent.

If you have existing Metro joinery we hold your paint mix and ironmongery codes on file and match exactly. For joinery from another supplier, we can colour-match almost any paint from a physical sample and can source most common handle families. This is worth getting right — under-stair joinery usually sits in the hallway, which is the most-seen piece of furniture in the house.

Allow 6 to 10 weeks from the first home visit to completion — shorter than a wardrobe commission because there are fewer cabinets, though the precision required is higher since every panel meets the stair line. Installation takes two to five days on site. If the space needs clearing, boarding or electrical first fix, we handle that before the joinery goes in.