Set into the wall, not standing against it

The most common thing we are asked is the simplest to state: make it not look like a gun cabinet. This is the version where the cupboard stops being an object in the room and becomes part of the room instead.

The cupboard is set into a run of painted panelling. The joints fall where the rhythm of the panelling puts them, so there is nothing at the edges to give it away, and the door carries the same mouldings as its neighbours. Closed, it is a panelled wall.

That is worth more than it sounds. A steel cabinet standing in a hall tells every visitor, tradesman and delivery driver that there are guns in the house and precisely where they are. Most owners would rather that information were not on display in their own home.

Concealment is a benefit on top of proper security, never instead of it, and we say so plainly: the storage still has to satisfy your firearms enquiry officer on its own merits. Behind the panelling this is a steel-lined carcass of more than 2mm, with folded steel doors, anti-cut pins and BS 3621 locks, anchored into masonry exactly as it would be if it stood in the open.

Because the panelling has to be set out around the opening from the first drawing, this is a decision worth taking early. It is not something that can be added neatly to panelling that already exists. If you are panelling a study, a hall or a dressing room in the next year or two and you shoot, it costs very little to allow for it now and a great deal to retrofit later.

Interiors are drawn around the collection in the usual way: barrel rack set out so guns stand without touching, heights for scoped rifles, and separate lockable ammunition storage where the certificate requires it.

Ammunition held separately, properly

For a firearm certificate the security condition covers the firearms and the ammunition. It is a point that catches people out, because for a shot gun certificate it covers the guns only, and the two get conflated.

Where separate ammunition storage is required, it needs to be exactly that: a separate lockable compartment with its own lock, not a shelf inside the same door. This cupboard has one built into the base, below the rack, with its own lock and its own steel.

The main compartment is lined in baize, which is not decoration. Guns stand against a soft surface rather than a hard one, and the barrel rack is set out so that no two guns touch. On a pair of good guns the finish is the thing you cannot replace, and the cost of getting the rack spacing right is nothing next to it.

The doors are solid timber rather than glazed, which suits a room where discretion matters more than display. Nothing about the outside of this cupboard announces what is inside it, and that is deliberate. Concealment has no standing in itself, but it does defeat the opportunist who never finds it.

Behind the timber the construction is the same as every cabinet we make: steel over 2mm throughout the lined carcass, folded steel doors with anti-cut pins on the hinge side, five-lever mortice locks to BS 3621, and fixings anchored into masonry rather than into plasterboard.

The specification was agreed with the client firearms enquiry officer in writing before manufacture began, and the signed specification sheet was handed over on installation.

A room made secure, then made beautiful

A gun room is not a cabinet with more doors. It is a room, and that changes the problem entirely.

With a cabinet, the security is the object: a steel box, bolted down, doing its work regardless of the wall behind it. With a room, the security is the fabric of the building — the walls, the door and its frame, the ceiling above, any window, and how they all meet. You can put the finest joinery in England inside a room whose walls are plasterboard on studwork, and you will have achieved nothing except a very expensive cupboard.

That is why the security goes in before the cabinetmaking. It is also why the first conversation is usually about what the walls are made of, what is above the ceiling and how the door is hung, rather than about timber and finishes.

Once that is settled, a gun room is one of the most rewarding rooms in a house to make. It is small, it is private, it is used by somebody who cares about what is in it, and it can carry a level of detail that would be excessive anywhere else.

Dividing the risk, not concentrating it

There is an assumption that a bigger collection means one bigger room, and it is worth questioning early.

For larger collections the Home Office guidance leans the other way: at the highest security level the instinct is to divide the risk — separate storage in different parts of the house — rather than to put everything behind one door. A single large gun room is not automatically what a firearms enquiry officer will prefer, and for some collections it is exactly what they will not.

In practice that often produces a better result anyway. The guns in regular use live in the room where they are cleaned and where the boots are. The rest — the pairs that come out twice a year, the inherited pieces, the ones that are really furniture — live somewhere else entirely, often in a cabinet that looks like a bookcase.

It is worth having that conversation before the drawings are done rather than after, because it changes the brief substantially.

Cost, programme and coverage

Fitted gun rooms start at around £20,000, and it is worth being clear about why a room costs several times what a cabinet does. A cabinet is one object. A room is four pieces of work in sequence.

The walls are lined in steel. The steel is clad in timber. A steel firearms door is fitted and then clad in timber to match. Then all the joinery goes in — gun racks, cabinetry, ammunition storage and the rest, drawn around the collection. Each stage has to be done in the right order, because none of them can be retrofitted neatly once the one after it is finished.

The range above £20,000 is driven mostly by size and by how much joinery the room carries. A modest room with racking and a bench is at the lower end; a large room with full panelling, a cleaning bench, drawer banks and cabinetry for cases and scopes is a good deal more.

We do not do building work, and we do not price any. The room needs to exist. If it needs walls moving, a window blocking or an opening formed, that is your builder’s job and it happens before we arrive — which is usually cheaper for you than having a joinery firm subcontract it.

Programme is typically a few months from drawings to handover. As with everything in this trade it is seasonal — enquiries arrive in spring for rooms wanted by the autumn, and the workshop fills accordingly.

We are at Mickfield in Suffolk, which puts East Anglia, London and the Home Counties within easy reach, and we work across the UK. For a room, we will always come and look at it.

Make it not look like a gun cabinet

The most common request we get is also the simplest to state and the most interesting to solve. People do not object to their cabinet. They object to looking at it.

There is a good reason for that beyond taste. A steel cabinet is a sign. It tells anyone standing in the room — a visitor, a tradesman, a cleaner, a child’s friend — that there are guns in the house and exactly where they are. Most owners would rather that information were not on display in their own hallway.

If you already own a cabinet that does its job perfectly well, there is rarely a good argument for replacing it. What we do instead is build the joinery around it, so that the wall reads as bookshelves, panelling, a boot room run or a bank of wardrobes, and the cabinet becomes part of the architecture rather than an object standing in front of it.

It is the least expensive way into fitted gun storage and usually the quickest. In our experience it is also how a good many gun rooms start — the joinery goes in, the room stops looking like a compromise, and two years later we are back doing the rest of it.

Working with the cabinet you already own

Before we draw anything we need to know exactly what we are building around. That means the make and model of the cabinet, its external dimensions including any handle or lock projection, how it is currently fixed, and which way the door swings and how far it needs to open.

The last of those catches people out. A cabinet door that opens to ninety degrees inside a case needs clearance for the door and for your arm, and if the case is scribed tight to a return wall that clearance disappears. It is the commonest reason a concealed installation ends up frustrating to use.

We also need to know what the wall is. If the cabinet is currently fixed into masonry, we work around the existing anchors wherever possible. If it is fixed into studwork or plasterboard, that is worth putting right while the joinery is off — it is the cheapest opportunity you will ever get to do it.

Where a client is buying a cabinet at the same time as commissioning the joinery, we will happily specify one, or make the whole thing ourselves to the specification on our cabinets page.