Make better use of your space with a sliding wall

Making the most of the available floor area in our residential projects is always a priority for us, whether we are designing a large luxury home for a private client or optimising the apartment layouts in a multiple-unit development for one of our developer clients.

(Fig. 1) Sliding wall at Bermondsey Warehouse

Thinking carefully about how people actually live in, and occupy, their domestic space is at the heart of this. We all know that some spaces in the home tend to get considerably more use than others, and so our designs often make use of full-height sliding walls to release and exploit the spatial and practical potential of areas that would otherwise get little use.

The most common application of this architectural device in our projects has probably been between the living area and a (2nd or 3rd) bedroom that is most often used as a study/home work area, and only occasionally used to accommodate overnight guests. In a typical single-aspect city apartment this often provides the opportunity to create a greatly enhanced sense of open-plan spaciousness in the living area by opening up an extended length of window wall to view, whilst also allowing for a home work area to be both integrated in, and separable from (when required), the principle living space.

(Fig. 2) Pocket Door at Market Yard Mews

Although there are many off-the-peg pocket door solutions, they tend to have size and height limitations and do not have the same visual and architectural impact as a full-height section of frameless wall that fully slides away to reveal a continuous ceiling plane above. Depending on the circumstance the wall can be detailed to be entirely pocketed when open so that it ‘disappears’ or can slide to park alongside a fixed section of wall, if a more expressed and/or industrial aesthetic is required. 

The possibilities for this relatively simple to execute device are endless and in our view likely to be seen more and more in the future. Particularly with the pressure to make more out of less (expensive) floor area in urban locations.   

(Fig. 3) Corner-pivoted storage wall at Markham Square

(Fig. 4) Sliding wall in the penthouse of our Ziggurat project

(Fig. 5) Curved sliding wall in the Penthouse in the Printhouse