Living rooms & offices · Muswell Hill, North London · 2004

A lounge built around a sofa

Floor-to-ceiling storage shaped around a new L-shaped sofa, with handmade curved tambour doors.

Tall birch ply unit with lights and a curved low unit with a silver tambour door — The finished unit, before the glass went in.

The curved low unit running round to the sofa — The curve runs round to meet the sofa.

WhereFlat in Muswell Hill, 2004

Made forMy best mate

MaterialsBirch ply, MDF tambour doors

Worth knowingHe came back 20 years later for another piece

Back in 2004 my best mate had just bought a big L-shaped sofa for his flat in Muswell Hill, and it left him with an awkward, very specific space around it. I said I could build him something in there that gave him loads of storage.

3D model of the flat with the planned unit next to the sofa — The 3D model of the flat.

3D model view along the curved unit to the sofa — Working out the curve against the sofa arm.

I modelled up his flat first and worked the design out from two numbers: the arm length of the sofa and the height of the room. Tall units went floor to ceiling, and lower curved units sat at exactly the height of the sofa arm. For the curved fronts I wanted tambour doors, the roll-up kind you see in office furniture, so I worked out how to make them myself, running tracks through the units and making the tambours from MDF strips backed with a sheet and sprayed silver. A few extra storage boxes were made in natural birch ply, with a 45 degree edge running all the way around the curve. Against the other arm of the sofa went a freestanding birch ply unit for more storage, with fabric slings I made to hold magazines and shelves down the side.

Render of the freestanding birch ply unit with magazines held in fabric slings — The freestanding unit for the other sofa arm, with fabric magazine slings.

Render of the freestanding unit from the front showing the side shelves — Shelves down the side.

Silver tambour door closed in its birch ply frame — The tambour door closed.

Silver tambour door rolled open showing the storage — And rolled open.

All of it was made in my garage with a circular saw and a jigsaw, at a time when you couldn't just look everything up on YouTube. It lived in my bedroom until it was finished, then went up to Muswell Hill in two pieces in the back of my mum's Volvo.

The curved birch ply unit being built in a garage — Built in my garage.

A large birch ply drawer box upside down in the garage — One of the natural birch ply drawer boxes.

My one regret is that the glass was delivered straight to him and I never got a photo of the finished unit with it in place. It's still one of the pieces I'm proudest of, and twenty years later he came back to me for another one.

Got a space like this one?

Send me a couple of photos and rough measurements of the space that isn't working, and we can talk it through on a short video call.

Start a project