Under the roofs of our houses sleep square metres nobody uses: too low to stand in, impossible to furnish with standard pieces. Yet they are the cheapest square metres in your house: they do not even count in its official floor area. Here is what you can really do with them, zone by zone, and at what price.
In Gerde, in Bagnères and all through the valley, upper floors live under the roof: attic bedrooms, converted lofts, mezzanines. And on every home visit I find the same scene: a wardrobe standing far from the wall, a triangle of dead space behind it, boxes piled up at the low point. Those square metres deserve better, and the method for winning them back comes down to three zones.
Under a , the only question that matters is the height available at each depth. You divide the space into three zones, and each zone has its own storage.
The gold-underlined words are explained on hover. All definitions are in the joinery glossary.
| Height under the slope | What to store there |
|---|---|
| Under 90 cm | High-capacity drawers (duvets, bed linen), shoe racks, chests, benches, niches for baskets or toys |
| 90 cm to 1.80 m | Low hanging rail (a shirt on a hanger needs about 1 m of clear height), shelves, built-in chest of drawers, desk or dressing table |
| Over 1.80 m | Full-height hanging (dresses and coats: 1.40 to 1.60 m of clear height), full-height columns, most often against the gable wall |
The section drawing decides everything: the hanging rail goes exactly where the slope gives the height of a hanger, the drawers where nothing else fits, the shelves in between. Well designed, a 3 m wide run under the eaves stores more than a large wardrobe, without advancing one centimetre into the room.
A shop-bought wardrobe is a rectangle: 2.01 m or 2.36 m tall for the most common carcasses, 58 cm deep, a vertical back. Under a 45-degree slope, every centimetre of the unit's height forces it back by as much: the wardrobe ends up more than a metre from the foot of the slope, and everything behind it is written off, often more floor area than the unit itself offers. Standard furniture does not fit under a slope; it camps in front of it.
Made-to-measure does the opposite: the carcasses are drawn to the exact angle of the slope, taken on site with a template, and the fronts are cut to follow the pitch. A closes the last gap against walls which, in our old houses, are never straight. The result: storage down to the last centimetre, and a piece that looks like it was born with the room.
A word on sliding doors, which I am often asked about. Under a slope they are handled differently: on the straight sections, a full-height sliding door works very well; under the slope itself, you move to fronts cut to the pitch, low sliding or hinged, and to drawers, nicer to live with day to day than a door you open crouching. And I will say it here as I do in the price of a bespoke walk-in wardrobe: entry-level sliding systems jump their rails and clog up, under a slope even more than elsewhere. Serious hardware or hinged doors. The low drawers, for their part, call for reinforced runners: a pile of duvets soon weighs 20 kg, and I explain those choices in hardware: what makes furniture last.
The loi Carrez, France's rule for a property's official floor area, and the surface habitable both exclude from the calculation any floor area with less than 1.80 m of headroom. In practice: those low zones did not count in the advertised floor area when the property was sold, and they will not count any more at resale. They are officially free square metres. Fitting them out creates storage without touching the square metres "that count", and unburdens the rooms that do make the value of the house. At the scale of a floor, a well fitted-out space under the eaves is the equivalent of a storeroom gained without pushing the walls out.
Let us talk prices, frankly. In slope-adapted kit form, the shop ranges come out between €700 and €1,800 fitted, as long as your slope is standard and your walls straight. In workshop made-to-measure, the French market sits between €1,200 and €2,500 per linear metre including fitting. With me, an open under-eaves fit-out of 2 to 3 m most often comes to between €1,500 and €3,500, and €3,000 to €6,000 with fronts, consistent with my ranges in the price of a bespoke walk-in wardrobe. The quote (devis) after the home visit is free, and the visit is precisely the step that decides everything: the full course is in a bespoke piece, how it works.
My last job of this kind, in an old house near Bagnères, turned an unusable loft into a wardrobe for the whole family: duvet drawers at the low point, double hanging in the middle, columns against the gable. No standard carcass would have gone in, and the upstairs bedroom got the space of two wardrobes back.
My honest opinion: the space under the eaves is the best storage for the money in the house, on one condition: treat it as furniture, not as a partition. The solution you see everywhere, a bit of plasterboard and a hatch door, does not create storage: it creates a loft with a door, where you pile things in front and lose them behind. And here is the honest answer you do not always get: below 40 cm at the low point, a fitted unit no longer gives back enough for what it costs, and I will tell you so on site, even if it means leaving without a quote. My fitted storage projects all start with that visit.
There is no absolute minimum: from 40 cm at the low point, you can fit drawers or shoe racks. The real question is the ratio between the cost of the unit and the storage gained. Below 40 cm, I say it honestly: you are often better off leaving the space open or sliding boxes in, made-to-measure does not bring enough there.
No. Floor areas with less than 1.80 m of headroom are excluded from the loi Carrez calculation and from the surface habitable alike. That is the whole point: you are equipping square metres that count nowhere, and freeing up the rooms that do count in the value of the house.
Yes, on two conditions. The cutting: the doors have to follow the roof slope, which means made-to-measure. The hardware: entry-level systems jump their rails and clog up quickly, under a slope even more than elsewhere. With serious rails and quality rollers, a sliding door under a slope runs for years without complaint.
I come and measure, even the corners everyone calls impossible, and I tell you frankly what is worth fitting out, and what is not. The quote is free. I speak English, so feel free to call or write in English.
+33 6 03 57 45 47Reply within 48 hours, or in writing: contact@agencementklein.fr
