Under-stairs storage

A typical London staircase conceals six to eight cubic metres of usable volume, enough for any of four common briefs: an under-stairs cupboard or display unit for the 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. The four pieces on this page show the range: the Pimlico hallway cabinet, the Hoxton open cloakroom, the Primrose wardrobe run and the Belsize stepped cupboards.

Every under-stair commission is priced after the free home visit, because the cost follows the staircase rather than the floor area: the number of doors and drawers, whether the void is opened into a walk-in room, the lighting and the finish. A run of stair-stepped cupboards is the simplest; a bank of pull-out drawers adds the runners; a lit walk-in pantry or wine store with a flush door is the most involved. Your designer gives a fixed price with the drawings, and any plumbing, electrics or worktop for a pantry is quoted separately.

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 under-stairs storage follows the stair line exactly, and the difference in usable space is usually the whole point of doing the work at all. It is the same reason our loft wardrobes are built to the pitch of the roof.

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 would build the joinery around a WC someone else installs. A compact desk under the stairs, on the other hand, is joinery, and is planned like our fitted home offices.

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: an under-stairs cupboard usually sits in the hallway beside the front door, the most-seen piece of furniture in the house, and it is often planned together with a fitted foyer unit or the fitted wardrobes upstairs.

Your 3D design and quotation arrive within two to three days of the home visit, and the storage is made and fitted within 21 days of confirming the order, usually one to two days on site. There are fewer cabinets than a wardrobe wall, but every panel meets the stair line, so the drawing stage is where the time goes.