Mention "a room under the stairs" and people always - always! - say "oh yes Harry Potter". Which upset me at first (you mean it's been done to death already? it's derivative, old hat?) but the other side of the coin is that if this is what people think of ("small and dusty, and lots of spiders"), how do you use that expectation - either to build on it, or to subvert it (preferably the latter, of course)."Under the stairs" also often conveys the "glory hole" jumble of unwanted items. Or perhaps, carefully organised storage. Use of unused, perhaps unusable, space. Call it "dead space" if you will...
Perhaps it intrigues me because I spent my formative years in a house with no basement and no attic. After which, it took only a short while of living in basement rooms (the haunt of poor students) to make "upstairs" very desirable. Now I live in the top two floors of a house converted into flats, and what would be my understair cupboard is in the downstairs flat (surely there's a metaphor in that...).Another thing that makes the understair area so fascinating is my lifelong love of "cupboard beds" - the idea of having a cosy room-within-a-room, with favourite books to hand, completely private. This goes back to some story read in childhood, no doubt. A cosy and safe place in which to read scary stories. It's the "tiny house" thing ... the "child cave" phenomenon.
Yet another cupboard-under-the-stairs story is of my winter in Menorca, living in an old stone farmhouse with no water or electricity or heating, and very little money. We would keep warm of an evening by taking our chairs and gas lamp and books into the cupboard under the stairs, which got reasonably cosy - and then it was time to jump into the icy bed. (Ah, we were young...)
You might recognise these stairs - even if you've never seen them before -
Yes, the piece is by Rachel Whiteread. Another variation on the "back stairs" design?
Would you be interested in seeing photos of outdoor stairways I took in Italy? I'm very intrigued by them.
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