EVERYONE has a secret, something they don’t want anyone else to know. Our homes have them, too. And they keep them carefully hidden where no one else can find them — in the spare room.
At the moment I am not lucky enough to live in a property with a single spare inch of room, never mind a whole spare room, but I do have cupboards which, despite my best efforts to be organised, perform the same function.
Into the spare room go the things that we can’t quite bring ourselves to throw away: the yoga mat we used once, the exercise bike we managed about 100 metres on, all the clothes we can no longer get into, and the CDs that we’ve turned into MP3 files. Whatever is in there, there is usually a lot of it. The end result is clutter. According to a survey from Habitat, nearly half of us feel that there is not enough space in our spare room for all the junk that we would like to hide. A third of those surveyed admitted that their spare room was “cluttered”. The rest were lying.
All this guilty mess means that the room is not actually spare. You can’t put guests in there, because there’s no bed. And if there is a bed, it’s piled high with domestic detritus. Even if it is set up for sleeping, you can’t use it as a home office as well — unless your guests are happy with you sneaking in to type while they snooze.
In our space-squeezed 21st-century homes no room can afford the luxury of being spare. We are embracing multifunctional furniture. Yet we allow the few rooms we have to do just one thing, whether it’s cooking, bathing, sleeping, eating or living. The spare room is the laziest of all. Or it was.
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Welcome to the 24-hour room. It’s a comfy guest bedroom, it’s a fully functional office, and it’s a home cinema. It promises to be everything and nothing, all at once.
The 24-hour room is a new concept from Neville Johnson, which specialises in handcrafted bespoke furniture. For years the company has been making home offices, slotting work space efficiently and unobtrusively into the home, usually the spare room. Now it has taken the next step and created a whole room that can be used throughout the day and night by different members of the family.
“It’s somewhere you can work, rest and play,” claims Lisa Lalor, a designer at Neville Johnson. “We squeeze a lot of functionality out of the space: the basic unit is three metres, so you don’t need a big room.”
The 24-hour room lines one wall. It looks similar to a row of fitted wardrobes and comes in the usual (rather dull) finishes: insipid ash and lukewarm mahogany, for example. It is split into thirds, with one function for each area. On the outside is the “Home Cinema”: a flat-screen LCD television and DVD combo (not included in the basic package). There is also DVD and CD storage. Behind a sliding door is hanging space for clothes and drawers for accessories. There is also a home office, with a small pull-out computer desk; you’d probably need a flat-screen monitor as a big model wouldn’t fit.
So far there’s nothing especially new about it. “It’s the bed that’s the big innovation,” says Lalor. It doesn’t pull down or fold out so much as concertina. “The bed fits perfectly inside the unit, so it’s completely hidden when not in use.”
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You can leave the sheets on, but you must remove the duvet and pillows — which is tiresome, but far less so than folding a futon. The whole thing appears and disappears by remote control. Available in single or double, it is comfortable enough for daily, or rather nightly, use. The bed was actually developed for hospitals. “It’s proving surprisingly popular with older couples who need a room for their grandchildren but don ‘t want to give up space they use for storage or hobbies,” says Lalor. So far, single beds have proved the most popular.
A 24-hour lifestyle demands a 24-hour room. But we all have vastly different lifestyles. “Each room is configured differently and we do a home visit to gauge your requirements and make sure the space is suitable,” says Lalor. One size does not fit all.
The minimum cost is £8,000, including fitting but excluding the home cinema system. It’s not cheap — especially given that it’s made from MDF — but it’s a lot cheaper than building another room. Not surprisingly, developers are eyeing the 24-hour room for studio flats.
You could, of course, come up with your own multifunctional space solution. A quick trip to Ikea, Habitat and perhaps also B&Q. The chances are that, after a week or two in flat-pack hell, your spare room would end up hiding another dirty secret: the great unfinished 24-hour room project. I know mine would.
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Neville Johnson: 0161-873 8333 www.nevillejohnson.co.uk
www.timesonline.co.uk/houseclinic
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