The Art of Storage

If you live in a Victorian terrace, you almost certainly have a chimney breast with an alcove on either side, and those alcoves are very probably the most underused space in the house. A standard freestanding wardrobe won't fit them properly. A rail and a curtain looks like a compromise because it is one. Most homeowners live with that wasted space for years simply because the obvious solutions don't work. Alcove wardrobes are the answer Victorian houses were practically buil

Victorian and Edwardian homes were not designed with wardrobes in mind. When these houses were built, between roughly 1837 and 1910, clothes were stored in freestanding furniture: armoires, tallboys, wooden chests. The fitted wardrobe is a twentieth-century idea, and retrofitting it into a nineteenth-century structure is where most standard solutions fall apart. I work almost exclusively in Brighton's period properties. The city has one of the highest concentrations of Victo

I use IKEA PAX as the foundation for almost every built-in wardrobe I install in Brighton's period homes, so I have an obvious stake in defending it. I'm going to try to set that aside here and give you the honest version: where PAX genuinely performs well in a Victorian or Edwardian house, where it has real limitations, and what actually determines whether the result looks built-in or looks like IKEA furniture against a wall. This isn't a sales page. If you're trying to deci