A Room Within A Room
Every kitchen has its challenges. Some are obvious. Others lurk in the corners.
The internal corner, where two runs of cabinetry meet, has long presented something of a conundrum for kitchen designers. It’s an awkward space, and many of the solutions are just as awkward. The pull-out carousel in the half-dark. Mechanisms that wear. The corner cupboard that offers access to almost nothing.
This was the problem presented to us in our project IH.685, where a full-height run met a worktop coming off perpendicular. The space was awkward, wasted, half-resolved.
Could we turn it into something genuinely useful, without sacrificing valuable kitchen floor space?
AN OLD IDEA, REIMAGINED
Our product designer Jules began exploring how we might reinterpret this traditional approach for project IH.685. As Jules explains: “It’s not really our style to go for slick mechanisms. We’d much rather solve problems in a traditional way, using real materials.”
We thought there might be a better way.
The walk-in pantry is hardly a new invention. Long before the refrigerator, pantries were an essential part of the domestic kitchen. Simple, practical spaces - cool shelves, dry air, provisions close at hand. Sometimes the best solutions to modern problems are found by looking backwards.
The answer was a room within a room.
A LITTLE ROOM FOR MANOEUVRE
Of course, an idea is one thing. Making it work is quite another.
The pantry needed to be deep enough to step inside and turn comfortably, yet compact enough not to intrude into the kitchen. The sliding door had to disappear neatly into the cabinetry while providing an opening wide enough for easy access.
Before committing the design to a client's kitchen, we built it full size in the corner of the workshop at Swallows. Filling the shelves. Standing in it.
Reaching for things, opening and closing the door with the kind of repetition that drawings never reveal. We adjusted the proportions until it simply felt right to be inside.
A simple exercise, but an important one. A kitchen needs to work for real people, not just look convincing on a drawing.
MAKING SPACE WHERE THERE WAS NONE
The internal corner defeats most conventional solutions because geometry is unforgiving. Corner cupboards waste what they cannot reach. Our walk-in pantry does something simpler and, we think, more considered: it reclaims the whole corner as a room.
A full-height sliding door runs on a Swiss-made HAWA mechanism and disappears silently into the body of the cabinet wall. Inside, the walls are plastered and painted, finished as part of the building rather than lined with cabinetry. “Its actually fairly simple,” says Jules. “But because its built in as part of the architecture effectively it requires accurate install and a lot of scribing into the walls.”
Step inside, and you are standing in a room.
The shelves are deliberately shallow along two walls, allowing ingredients and provisions to sit in a single row. No rummaging behind forgotten packets. Everything is visible, everything within reach. A light fitting completes it.
No elaborate corner mechanisms. No complicated arrangements of moving parts. Just good materials, thoughtful proportions and straightforward, accessible storage.
And there’s an undeniable pleasure in opening what appears to be an ordinary cupboard door and discovering a little room beyond.
A proper Walk in Pantry, tucked away behind the kitchen cabinetry. Perfect for storage. And hide and seek.
Inglis Hall designs and makes bespoke kitchens from our studio in Lewes and workshop at Golden Cross. Though we’re based in Sussex and work on many projects across Brighton & Hove and the South East, we create kitchens and architectural interiors for homes all over the UK. If a kitchen built around restraint and natural materials sounds like something you dream of, we’d love to chat.