Triangle Under the Stairs

The house has been lived in a long time. The staircase is the older Thai kind, in a dark red stain, with a safety net tied along the run of it. Next to the stair there is a louvered timber door and its frame, both as old as the house. The floor is newer: large marble-look tile. And the space under the stair was the leftover triangle every house has, too low to stand up in and too big to leave empty.

We made one thing for this house: the whole drawer unit under the stair, in reclaimed teak. The staircase, the louvered door and its frame and the tiled floor were all here already and are not our work, and the brass handles are the owner's own find, which we only fitted for them. The unit was built as a single triangular box in the workshop, its sloping top cut to the exact rake of the underside of the stair, then wheeled in and pushed home in one piece. Because that ceiling drops the whole way along the diagonal, no two drawers in the upper row are the same height: the sizes were set by the staircase, not by us.

There are a lot of drawers here and not one of them matches another, and the whole thing still reads as a single panel rather than a heap of boxes. The horizontal joints run straight through from one column into the next, so the eye takes it in as bands stacked up the wall with one clean diagonal cut across them. Every front is a flat board with the grain running horizontally, carrying on from one front to the next across the whole face, and a frame runs round the outside, along the diagonal and up the vertical. What you see is one triangular panel that happens to open, not a set of holes cut into a wall.

Anything under a staircase becomes the house's catch-all. Shoes, tools, papers, bags — whatever has no home yet ends up in these drawers first. The bottom row sits at ankle height, so people open it with a toe or a knee more often than with a hand. And the foot of the stairs is the busiest square metre in a house: everyone passes it several times a day with their hands full. The other thing about a piece like this is that it cannot be replaced by anything bought. Its shape exists in this house and nowhere else. If it ever wears out, somebody has to measure the same triangle and build it again.