Hidden- but handy

DesignSolutions: Although you might have seen his decoration of Farmleigh House in the Phoenix Park, most of designer Peter Willis's projects involve creating interiors for private homes.

Problem: His own home is a redbrick house just beyond Sally's Bridge off the South Circular Road.

A great deal of renovation work and reorganisation of the downstairs rooms was needed after he bought it four years ago. One of the things Peter wanted from the outset was to extend the house in some way in order to create an extra room. A glass structure to the rear seemed an obvious move but on realising that this would mean losing some of his small garden, he converted the attic area instead.

It is reached from a staircase on the first floor and has taken on many functions, acting as a sleeping space for guests, study and place to practise yoga.

The wood on the vaulted ceiling is limed and slopes downwards until it reaches broad structural beams that run across the width of the house.

"I could have left this space open and let the ceiling continue to slope down to the floor," says Peter, "but because I had to store the water tank in the attic, it really had to be boxed in."

A wood partition, also limed, was built to hide the water tank and create some storage. Both had to be accessed occasionally. "What I didn't want was two plain doors with a look of 'what's in there' about them."

Solution: "I knew I didn't need to access the water tank or the storage very often so I adapted an idea I had seen at a friend's apartment in Paris: they had shelves built into a wall between a bathroom and another room - so I thought, why not have bookcases built into the new wall and let them also open as a kind of door."

So that's what he had his builder do when finishing the woodwork. Two small bookcases were inserted into openings in the wall - behind one is the water tank and behind the other is some storage space.

They open by pulling outwards from the wall. This isn't hard to do as they are not heavy - just a little care is needed so books don't fall off the shelves. "I don't believe in having shelves just for the sake of it - often they're used to collect things other than books that people don't really need - but these work here because they're not too big and you'd never know they're also doors, so the storage space behind couldn't be more unobtrusive."

Peter Willis 087 2243151