Built-In Furniture

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 546, 26 December 1928, Page 7

Built-In Furniture

(By

“PENATES”

May Come to New Zealand DOUBLE DUTY ROOMS WITH the modern demand for small compact houses has come a corresponding increase in the use of built-in furniture. We have by now become accustomed to the double-duty bed, which is a couch by day and an ordinary bed by night, and the double-duty room, which has been tried with success in other parts of the Empire will soon make an appearance.

To enter a room charmingly, if simply, equipped with the furniture necessary for the modern sitting-room, and to find that its walls conceal all the furnishings of a modern bedroom is perhaps a little disconcerting, but the idea is extremely practical. For the individual who “rooms” its has obvious advantages, but the idea can be, and is, used in the ordinary dwelling house. By means of the built-in furniture every member of the family has not only his own bedroom, but incidentally his own sitting-room, and the concealment of the more utilitarian pieces of furniture leaves a wider scope for the artistic possibilities of such a room. To-day it is possible to have builtin cupboards which conceal a washbasin with hot and cpld water laid on, and all the accommodation necessary for clothes, while a panel in the wall can be let down to reveal a bed, made and ready to be slept in.

It is a scheme which has much to recommend it; in fact, the only real quarrel one might have with it is simply a matter of temperament. One woman who had occupied such a room for a month said that after the first few weeks the room seemed to possess a certain irritating inevitableness, which made her have a mad desire to wrest the bed from its foundations against the wall and plant it firmly in the dead centre of the room. It is true, that when life has reached its utmost pitch of monotony, it is comforting to resort to moving furniture about, to turn the bed round the other way, to. push the wardrobe into a far corner, and move the dressing table across to the other wall, but that one cannot do all this in a double duty room. is a minor disadvantage which would only assume large proportions for those who like to think that they are temperamental.

A room in a house in Paris has had the “built-in” idea carried almost as far as it is possible at present to carry it. The bed does not fold out of the wall, but it stands in a rectangular alcove with the head built in to the back wall of the alcove. There is a space of about two feet between the sides of the bed and the walls of the alcove, and the built-in head of the bed is extended two feet on either side to form two bedside cupboards -with bookshelves on top. The dressing table fits into a recess in the wall. The lower part is made in the shape of a knee-hole desk with drawers on either side, while the walls of the recess above the "desk" are lined wth mirrors, which cover the three sides, and just out of the wall from two in the form of two folding wings. If it is desired the whole dressing table can be completely concealed from view in the day time by drawing a silk curtain across the alcove.