small doesn't have to mean cramped with STORE's fab storage solutions!

RIBA’s new Case for Space report estimates that the floor space of the average 3 bedroom home in UK falls 86 sq/ft short of its recommended size. That’s 8% smaller than guidelines suggest which RIBA feels leaves us Brits with “shameful shoe box homes” as compared to our European neighbours. Homes in Ireland are 15% bigger whilst our Dutch neighbours enjoy homes that are 53% bigger and in Denmark new homes are almost an amazing 80% bigger on average than UK.

In a separate survey RIBA found that 58% of home owners claimed they did not have enough space for their furniture and over 70% were frustrated that there was not enough storage for their possessions.

Former director-general of the CBI, Sir John Banham is to conduct a RIBA enquiry next summer which will feed into the government’s controversial proposals to alter planning rules. RIBA wants consumers to get better information from estate agents and house builders such as floor space to be included in marketing material and floor plans to include furniture, so that people can get a clearer idea of the size of a property.

But how do you organise someone who just simply has no idea about timekeeping in the mornings? Whilst searching for our neat new range of travel accessories this summer we stumbled across another neat organisational solution that may just be the answer.

Apparently the average UK householder  spends 8.5 minutes in the shower each morning and simply by organising your time a little better with the help of our new Shower Coach you could save over 31.5 litres of water each week and a lot of gas or electricity used to heat your water. Better still it’s a great way to organise your morning routine, saving precious time to get to the bus stop for the 8.05am and make sure your utility bill’s a little smaller each quarter.

our 5 Minute Shower Coach just may be the answer for a disorganised family member who likes to hog the bathroom

Whilst we know lots about storage products here at STORE we’d never really thought about using elfa as a van racking system before, however our friends at Volt Air Marine Engineering were so complementary after testing our elfa shelving system and plastic storage boxes as a van racking solution that we thought some readers may like to see the results:

Installed in the pride of Volt Air’s fleet (a 2-week old Vauxhall Vivaro long wheel base van), our elfa van racking and storage system cost £950 (incl VAT) in total  to rack-out the entire vehicle. This included all basket shelving, storage boxes, sparring baskets, and part bins AND (we’re told) was a third of the price of the last van racking system Volt Air installed.

Volt Air MD Adam White explained that:

“The total weight of the metal elfa van racking system is around 85kg which is a fraction of the weight of other metal and wood van shelving systems we’ve used in the past. The last thing we wanted was a van racking system that then limited the weight of tools and parts we could carry on-board and elfa has proved spot on…there’s even room to carry a fully laden Euro pallet on the deck without snagging the shelving and parts bins.”

Our elfa basket shelves and elfa sparing baskets have also proved ideal at minimising movement of tools and stock in the test van on motorway journeys making life more pleasant on long drives and tool and parts storage more organised and easy to hand for the marine engineers once on site.

Thanks to Volt Air Marine Engineering for sharing their van racking images and thoughts on our elfa system with STORE. Volt Air are suppliers of electro-mechanical engineering solutions to the fishing and shipping industry providing everything from general ship management to superintendant work.

Elfa van racking systems from STORE are available in component form online for easy DIY installation. For details of a bespoke and fleet installation , please contact Simon at STORE

1958 – As an architecture student at Milan Polytechnic, Colombo was already experimenting with product design in the new wonder material, plastic! He’d previously studied fine art then experimented with abstract art, stumbling into design in 1953 when he was asked to design the ceiling and three open-air seating areas of a jazz club.

1963 – Obsessed with storage, Colombo creates the Combi-Centre. This mobile storage unit (see image left) consisted of a series of cylindrical units that slotted into each other and was designed to store books, drinks or even used as a tool storage cabinet.

In the same year he also produced The Mini-Kitchen, a wheeled storage container just 90cm high and 75cm wide with a hob, oven, grill, fridge, work-top and which still had storage for cookbooks, kitchen utensils and foodstuff.

1964 – Colombo designed the famous Man-Woman Storage Container. He saw this as a modern take on the Victorian travel trunk or perhaps the seaman’s chest but for a couple.  The Man-Woman Storage Container had enough shelves, clothes rails, storage drawers and a mirror for two people all inside two storage boxes.

1967 – Colombo’s experiments in the design of modular furniture culminate with his space saving chairs – Additional Living System. He loved product that could be adapted to the users own environment and needs and then perhaps stored away to save space when not required and this was just that.

1968 – Box 1, Colombo’s “night and day facility” was manufactured. The Box 1 contained all the requirements of a bedroom within a series of interlocking storage boxes which when required divide to become a bed, wardrobe and shelves.

1969 – VISIONA1, a more luxurious version of Box 1 was designed which Colombo described as his “habitat of the future” and which contained the contents of an entire house within a series of mobile storage units with no dividing walls, (perhaps inspired by Le Corbusier’s Transformable Double-House).

Back with kitchen storage, Colombo designed the Roto-Living Unit in 1969 for his own kitchen which also had a small production run. The unit consisted of a storage cube with a central rotating table which could be adjusted to different heights surrounded and enclosed by kitchen storage units.

‘69 can’t pass without mentioning his CABRIOLET-BED. Whilst this item wasn’t a product designed with storage in mind it’s an absolute design classic of the 60’s. The bed had a hood that closed like a convertible car to provide total privacy for the user(s), and a lighting system that could simulate day or night time lighting alongside a stereo system.

Colombo's Boby Trolley

1970 – Colombo’s design work with storage products culminated in 1970 with the famous Boby Trolley. Made from ABS it had rotating drawers and shelves and 40 years later is still now in production with Bieffeplast.

1972 – MoMA New York exhibits Colombo’s Total Furnishing Unit, a 1971 designed giant storage box that has all the essentials of modern living, a kitchen, bathroom, bed and storage cupboards all contained within a single storage box in classic Colombo colours of white, yellow, red and black.

Sadly Colombo died on his 41^st birthday 30 July 1971 so did not get to see his masterpiece of storage design in MoMA.

Colombo’s 1971 Total Furnishing Unit

Apparently 1 in 12 of us are scammed by fake websites when purchasing festival tickets. That’s 5,000 people loosing an average of £80 each this year. For detailed information about scam ticket websites and how to protect yourself visit: www.consumerdirect.gov.uk/ticketscams.

The OFT site also has a neat video section too including this amusing bootleg Florence and the Machine video:

If you are off to Glastonbury, V or The Big Chill this summer we’ve plenty of neat ideas storage ideas here at STORE HQ to help organise your trip and keep the tent decluttered. Here’s a few of my favourites:

Weekend Wash Bags – A great little storage box with everything you need for a weekend away including make-up remover, toothpaste, deodorant wipes, cotton buds and pads etc. Choose from a his or hers storage boxes.

Card & Money Wallet – Neat waterproof storage box to hang around your neck and store money, cards and other valuables you wouldn’t want to leave in your tent.

Über Cool cool bag – Trendy yet sensibly priced cool bag to store your cool drinks or how about make-up so it doesn’t melt in the hot tent.

Sun Protection Kit – Another neat little storage box with all those essentials to protect you from the sun including a handy UV Monitor Card, Moisturiser, Sun Cream, Tissues, Plasters, Hair Band, and a Refreshing Wipe.

Apart from it’s striking exterior that was pretty much at the vanguard of modern architecture, La Corbusier’s house is as amazing in its clever use of internal space and storage.

Known as the “Transformable Double-House” (it doesn’t have such a ring to it when translated into English!), Le Corbusier designed the interior with flexibility and efficient use of space in mind. Each internal area was carefully thought-out to allow adaption for different uses of the space at differing times of the day and indeed also offer multifunctional roles at the same time for it’s occupants without the feeling of being surrounded by clutter.

Family space in the Le Corbusier house is axially arranged on a single floor. During the day the space is not delineated by walls, only by columns.  By night, sliding partitions sub-divide the space into “sleeping cells” which can be configured as the resident wishes.  As in a steam train sleeper carriage of the time, the beds fold away during the day into multifunctional storage cupboards. Le Corbusier also planned to add a range of compact bent wood space saving furniture that would equip all areas for both day and night use but was sadly compromised by budget and time.

Le Corbusier’s vision was for a modular house to which more bays could be added as and when additional space was required (sounds rather like our elfa shelving!). The addition of extra space could be easily achieved as the stairs were placed perpendicular to the main body of the building. To save further space this in turn backed onto a shared garden.

This visionary house was flexible both in design and in social relations but at the time Le Corbusier was criticised for his “romantic use of technology” and the “focus on a bourgeois clientele” which I think was a tad unfair.

What I find amazing about the interior of this 1920’s house was the visionary thinking when it came to multifunctional use of space. Today we live in much smaller houses and often have to make our rooms and family space work much harder for us by giving them multifunctional uses, e.g. a modern living room that may also have a small desk providing a quasi home office in the corner. Le Corbusier was way ahead of his time when it came to how we actually use our space rather than what we officially designate it for and lovers of modern architecture & interior design plus storage & decluttering geeks like me would find the Weissenhofsiedlung  estate and the preserved 1927 Le Corbusier house well worth a visit.

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky

I think the world’s oldest fitted kitchen is probably The Frankfurt Kitchen which was designed by Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in 1926 as an ergonomic low cost ‘one design fits all’ kitchen for the masses & which sought to provide adequate work and storage space for both cooking and laundry.

It seems to me that Schütte-Lihotzky was way ahead of her time, effectively inventing the modern fitted kitchen in a Eureka moment but her ideas were not just about good design, there was a lot of scientific thought behind the layout.

Perhaps influenced by the American Fredrick Taylor’s turn of the century papers on the scientific management of workflow (the process now commonly referred to as Taylorism), Schütte-Lihotzky careful studied routine kitchen tasks and designed the Frankfurt kitchen around the space and storage required for each chore.

The result IMHO was a masterpiece of decluttering the traditional domestic kitchen and included items such as food storage containers and jars that were always close to hand (near preparation areas) yet neatly tucked out of site.

At only 1.9m wide by 3.4m long, Schütte-Lihotzky had to be very clever with her use of kitchen storage and she incorporated a sliding rather than traditionally opening kitchen door into the design to maximise the space she could then use within the kitchen area.  Shown in the photo (on the left hand wall) there’s also a neat use of vertical storage space with a fold-down ironing board.

The right hand wall housed most of the food storage cupboards and included dedicated labeled storage bins/scoops for rice, flour, sugar etc. Amazingly (and don’t forget we’re talking 1926 here) this unit also container a recycling bin (actually it was a drawer) that food scraps could be brushed into and emptied afterwards.

The narrow galley-style layout, not so unfamiliar to lots of us today was not solely a result of space constraints, it was a conscious design decision on Schütte-Lihotzky’s part to minimise the number of steps needed when working within the kitchen….how very Tayloristic!

Perhaps however, the Tayloristic approach was in the end the downfall of the Frankfurt kitchen. Like Taylor himself who received strong reaction to his scientific management methods from factory workers who found the repetitive processes boring and “requiring little skill”, the Frankfurt kitchen was often described as not flexible enough. In developing a standard method for performing each kitchen or laundry task perhaps Schütte-Lihotzky had forgotten that we human beings are not all the same and operate in different ways. Another issue often cited was that the storage bins were too accessible by small children.

Despite these criticisms, the Frankfurt kitchen became a model for the modern fitted kitchen. Some 10,000 units were installed Frankfurt’s high-rises and as such it was a massive commercial success.

I love the look and design of the Frankfurt kitchen and the idea that way back in 1926 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky was thinking about efficient use of space, decluttering the kitchen environment and kitchen storage solutions.

Four years ago the Victoria and Albert Museum acquired a Frankfurt kitchen for its traveling exhibition. The same year another sold for nearly £35,000! Sadly at the time of writing the V&A’s Frankfurt kitchen is currently in store but if you search the collections area of the V&A website there’s some great photos of their Frankfurt kitchen although I have to confess I think the V&A may have sourced the wrong kitchen chair as Schütte-Lihotzky original design had a revolving stool on castors for maximum flexibility!

Recyclable Plastic Storage Boxes

If you haven’t spotted our new range of plastic Nick Nack storage boxes yet they went onto our STORE shelves a few days ago. These neat little plastic boxes have a bigger story to tell than perhaps is offered at first sight. Apart from being a great little storage box for all those trinkets and bits & bobs that always seem to clutter-up your drawers, they’re actually made from the world’s first 100% biodegradable plastic. Each storage box is manufactured from a combination of polymer and corn starch which when disposed of in compost or soil will TOTALLY biodegrade in 6 – 9 months. Still not convinced? Here’s the science bit:

To create our new plastic storage boxes, naturally occurring bacteria are fed sugar that is obtained from corn starch. The bugs digest the sugar and store the resulting PHBV polymer much as the human body would store fat. The “fat” is then extracted and becomes an injection mouldable polymer called poly-3-hydroxy butyrate-co-valerate…a derivative of the molecule that Forbes magazine declared “one of the five molecules that will change the world.”…and guess what, it was first developed right here in Blighty in the late 1980s

Wasp expert Dr Stephen Martin from Sheffield University Department of Animal and Plant Sciences suggested that there was not much that could be done to protect your wooden garden furniture from wasps but we think we’ve a great idea:

“Oh, what a wonderful thing to be, A healthy grown up busy busy bee; Whiling away all the passing hours, Pinching all the pollen from the cauliflowers”

Our Wasp Trap Pots have already been the saviour of many a Danish summer according to our friends and makers Kim and Ellie and now they’re available here in UK. The pot can either be hung from the cord provided or simply sat on a table to provide effective protection from wasps.  Add a splash of beer to the internal reservoir and wasps are attracted through the small hole at the base (that incidentally is too small for bees) into the sweet beer. Remove the inebriated wasps at the end of the night or simply leave them to carry-on partying.

As an alternative (and in line with Dr Martin’s thinking)  why not simply protect your garden table and chairs with a cover. Our neat Camouflaged Circular Table Cover makes for a tasteful protector for your garden furniture to keep your table dirt and bug free. We also have matching items for your chairs and rotary washing lines.

Finally, not wishing to be too hard on our insect friends we do also retail our award winning Bee House. This lovely idea will help protect our native endangered humble bees. The lovely little chaps will quickly take advantage of this des res at the end of the summer and hibernate safe and warm until next spring, sealing off the end of each tube themselves to keep warm until next spring.