A cabinet designed to be looked at

This is the version of a gun cabinet we are asked for most often by clients who have a room worth putting it in. The brief is nearly always the same: it has to hold the guns properly, it has to satisfy the firearms enquiry officer, and it must not look like a safe.

The architecture does most of that work. A dentil cornice runs the full width above the doors, with fluted pilasters either side carrying the eye down to a moulded plinth. Those are cabinetmaking details borrowed from case furniture rather than from security products, and they are the reason the piece reads as a bookcase at a glance.

Behind them the construction is exactly what it would be on a solid-fronted cabinet: a steel-lined carcass of more than 2mm throughout, folded steel doors with anti-cut pins on the hinge side, and five-lever mortice locks to BS 3621. The timber is the finish, not the security.

The glazing is laminated anti-bandit glass. It is heavy, and the doors and their hinging are designed around that weight from the start rather than adapted to it afterwards. Laminated glass matters here for a specific reason: it holds together in the interlayer when struck rather than falling out of the frame, which is the whole point of using it in a door somebody may attack.

Inside, the barrel rack is set out so that guns stand without touching one another, and the heights are drawn so that scoped rifles go in with the scopes left mounted. It sounds a small thing until you own a rifle and have to dismount a scope every time it goes away.

The cabinet was delivered and installed by our own team and anchored into masonry. That is not an upgrade: a gun cabinet has to be fixed to the structure of the building to be adequate, and a cabinet standing free on a floor is not secure storage however well it is made.