Oast House Roundel Headboard with Floating Side Shelves

I always like working in unique properties and in Kent there are certainly no shortage of quirky old cottages and farm houses. The county is without doubt synonymous with Oast houses and there are a lot around.

Although they are amazing spaces they are particularly hard to furnish, never originally being intended for occupation. This is why services of bespoke built to fit furniture comes into its own.

This client wanted a simple bed head and side shelves so I came up with several alternatives and they chose this one.

I started by taking a template of the curvature of the wall and where the bedhead was going to be positioned.  The roundel, though round, isn’t perfectly round and once my template was cut if I moved it round the walls out of it’s position it wouldn’t fit. Making a template was crucial  for this work to be a success.

The hardest thing about this design was creating the floating shelves. Due to the curvature in the wall, traditional consealed shelf fittings wouldn’t work so I ended routing out the underside of shelves and creating a space for a forked plywood insert. The plywood insert could then be fitted directly to the wall and the oak shelf slide over it.

This worked well, although wouldn’t work for shelves that were deeper or needing to take more weight.