Coats, shoes, dog leads. Hide them inside cupboards that look as much like one board as possible - that was the brief for this unit. Fitted in an architecturally-stunning flat in a 60s school conversion in Vauxhall, I was eager to create something that did justice to the flat’s clean minimalist lines.

Open overlay doors revealing some of the internal storage

Here you can see push-to-open overlay doors - this means the plywood end grain is hidden until you open the doors. Because there’s a corner with openings on tangential sides, I put mitres on those doors and parts of the carcase to eliminate any visible end grain.

Finally, we decided to mill a line into the large right hand panel to match the lines of the doors to the left.

Getting the doors, angles and channels to line up perfectly is the key and the killer on something like this - when you’ve inset doors, you’re just lining up inside the carcase. When you’ve overlays, every part has to line up with the other, and this is an organic material which doesn’t always stay exactly where you put it. Fractions-of-millimetre precision is what’s needed, which entails a lot of frowning at hinge adjusters. Pretty happy with the way it worked out though.

Birch ply doors showing their beautiful finish

An exacting customer - her leads are kept in the small left-hand cupboards

A Hall Cupboard and Shelf Unit