It’s so easy for a house to become overrun with clutter, and there’s some great storage solutions on the market to help organise your space. But if you think about your storage needs in the planning stages of a renovation, you can take advantage of often underutilised space.
Here we look at our Adelaide Street project, a family home which needed more storage and functionality for their busy life. By using innovative design, we were able to provide new ways of improving storage around the home.
Stairs
The area under the stairs is often a dead space where things get shoved into and never return. However it’s so easy to better utilise this space by transforming it into a mix of cupboards, shelves and drawers, which makes very useful storage and a visually appealing display system.
Home Office
Keep work/home work off the dining table and create a dedicated home office/homework space to keep everything in the one place. It’s important to plan out what you need in the drawers and cupboards, as well as frequency of using them so that everything has its place.
Also think about wall space for the area. In this space we combined shelving with cupboards to make a practical solution that also looks good and isn’t too visually heavy.
Original Spaces
Step back and look at spaces in different ways – you’ll often find storage opportunities you have not thought of before. In this project we utilised the landing to create a library space using bookshelves to form the balustrade of the stair. This not only created more storage but gave the space a function.
Seating
Built in seating is always versatile, and creating dual purpose solutions are always a winner. By warping the family room with bench seating we created extra storage but also ample seating for kids. These drawer are then the perfect storage solution for storing and organising a plethora of kids toys, games and crafts.
Mirror Cabinets
This isn’t a new idea, but it does make a big impact to storage in your bathroom. By adding narrow mirror cabinets the storage gain can be massive and narrow shelves make it easier to find things rather than rummaging through drawers or under the sink.
To learn more about this project or to see other work by the team, visit our website –
Photos : Steve Ryan