Multifunctional furniture buys to make your home more flexible

When is a coat stand not a coat stand? When it’s also a place to keep towels and bathroom accessories. If your home isn’t multitasking as hard as you are, you need to get creative and think about choosing furniture and homeware that could be used in various ways around the house. It’s all about flexible living and creating clever new uses from whatever you have.

This is especially true if space is limited and there’s no scope to dedicate a whole room to an office, or place a large storage cabinet in a bathroom. That’s when you have to hustle and invest in multifunctional furniture that makes your home life easier.

Desks can be beautiful pieces of furniture in their own right; but sometimes you don’t want your bedroom, dining table or living room to look and feel like a workspace. This is why bureaus, leaning desks, String shelving and pedestal tables are such fantastic buys when you're trying to WFH subtly.

A bureau when not in use is a handsome, useful cupboard with a handy surface on top for a speaker, table lamp or vase of flowers. The desk folds down only when you need to work on a laptop or write, but there’s also a load of storage hidden away inside, so they can conceal folders and paperwork or even transform into crafting stations.

Leaning desks when not functioning as desks are great space-saving bookshelves and places to keep a record player, group of house plants or a small TV. A side table with a base designed to slide under the sofa means you can work from a comfy spot when you need to (ideal if you don't have a dining table and chairs) and then, when you're not on your laptop, swivel it around and it's a lamp table and place to plonk your coffee.

Console tables are perfect in a hallway by the door – they’re a spot to keep your keys and post, with a mirror on the wall above. Likewise, they dress a living room and give a much-needed surface for decorative pieces – they also help to create vignettes on empty walls. Hang a piece of art above, add a potted plant and a lamp and you've added instant focus and character to a space. But how else could you use a console?

If your home is compact and doesn’t have a space for a dining table, choose a console table that folds open to become a dining table, then when you’re not using it, it doesn’t take up your precious floor space. You can also use a console as a dressing table – just hang a mirror above or use a small mirror on a stand – or as a desk. Either way, choose a style that has at least 40cm of depth so you have enough space for a laptop and avoid anything with a shelf or cross bar at kneee height as you need space for your legs. If the console has a drawers or hidden storage – even better – it's a place to keep your make up or keyboard and tablet. Lastly, if you don’t want to waste the space underneath, choose a style with shelves so it also ticks the bookcase box.

Long gone are the days of matchy-matchy suites of wardrobes, bedside tables and chests of drawers. The best modern bedrooms mix and match pieces from complementary ranges for a more interesting and unique look.

You don’t have to stick to designated bedroom furniture when you're maximising the potential of a bedroom – especially if it's a spare room. Think about including some pieces that would traditionally be used in a living room. If you’re tight on space for bedside tables, shop side tables instead, and if there's nowhere to store a burgeoning shoe collection, how about using a cabinet or cupboard with doors and shelves inside? They’re the perfect shoe-storage solution as they generally hold lots of pairs and they’re hidden from view. Tip: make sure to check that the depth of the shelves will be long enough for your shoes!

You could also replace a double or single bed in a rarely-used guest bedroom with an easy-to-fold sofa bed or a chic iron day bed that you can style as a sofa with extra cushions. They'll make the space more practical and comfortable for utilising during the day. We also love to use sideboards in kids’ bedrooms if there's enough space along a wall, as they hold so many boxes and baskets of toys and board games, plus they often have pre-made holes in the back for cables if they're teens with a TV and games console.

There are many smaller bits and pieces that you can use in ways they weren’t intended (looking at you flower pots as coloured pencil pots, baskets as planters, toolboxes as lego containers). 

The humble coat hook could live by the front door or it could also provide much-needed towel hanging space in a bathroom, a place to hang shopping bags, baskets, aprons and bunches of herbs in the kitchen, or how about on a child's bedroom wall with a favourite outfit on show, or for drawstring bags of their fiddly small toys? The same goes for a coat stand, let them live a life beyond the hallway and use them in the bathroom for towels, robes and string bags of sponges and brushes.

Drinks trolleys and bar carts look sleek and stylish in living spaces but they’re also ridiculously handy to use as portable crafting stations, bath-side tables or for books and toys in children's bedrooms. Anywhere you need stuff to hand – simply wheel them into place as and when you need. And lastly, where would we be without the humble basket? A laundry basket is never just a laundry basket. It’s also a planter (use a saucer inside), a place to keep sofa blankets and a marvellous way to store and tidy away toys in just about every room of the house.