Shelving a San Francisco Victorian

The problem is not that there is no room for shelving. It is that the room is in eleven pieces.

A San Francisco Victorian is a generous building made of ungenerous walls. The ceilings are tall, the rooms are tall, the light is extraordinary — and when you go looking for somewhere to put a bookcase, you find that every wall in the flat is interrupted. A bay window takes most of one. A doorway sits in the corner of another rather than the middle. There is a fireplace, or the chimney breast where one used to be. There is a picture rail at seven feet, wainscot below, and a door that swings into the only clear stretch left.

The floor plate is narrow — the city's residential lots are famously slim, and the buildings on them are long and thin — so the rooms are laid out front to back, and the good wall in each one is usually the one with the window in it.

That is the actual problem, and it is not a shelving problem in the way people expect. It is an inventory problem.

1. Do the wall inventory first, and count what is really left

Before anything else, walk the room and write down every stretch of uninterrupted wall with its clear width and its clear height. Not the nominal wall — the clear one, between the real obstructions: casing, reveal, chimney breast, radiator, switch plate.

In a Victorian flat the list almost always comes back looking like this:

• one long wall, interrupted somewhere near the middle or the end
• two or three stretches between 24 and 48 in wide, beside the bay, beside the door, in the alcove next to the chimney breast
• a band above the picture rail that nobody has ever used
• a hallway wall that is longer than any wall in any of the rooms

Almost none of that is a bookcase-shaped opportunity, and all of it is a shelving opportunity. This is the reason a modular system suits the building type: the alcove beside a chimney breast is a 30 in wall, and 30 in is a bay. A stretch beside a bay window is a 24 in wall, and that is a bay too. Small walls are their own discipline and a Victorian is mostly made of them.

A run does not have to be continuous, and — this is the part people take longest to accept — the bays do not have to match. A 36 in bay can sit beside a 24 in one. What ties the room together is that every shelf in it is at the same height and the same depth, not that every bay is the same width.

2. The walls are not flat, and that is dealt with elsewhere

Everything above assumes the walls will accept a straight line, and in a hundred-and-twenty-year-old building they will not, quite. Lath and plaster applied by hand over redwood framing, patched for a century, moving with the building the whole time — run a straightedge across it and you will find bows, dishes and proud runs over the studs.

This is a solved problem and we have written it up in full: shelving screwed directly to a wall inherits the shape of that wall, and a track removes the problem rather than correcting it. One straight line, levelled once, and the standards hang from the track rather than from the plaster — so the front edges of your shelves agree with each other instead of with the building.

Two things that post does not say, and that a Victorian adds:

The framing is old-growth and it is not where you expect. Redwood and Douglas fir studs from the period are hard, they take a screw beautifully, and they are frequently on spacings that no modern rule predicts — with extra studs where walls were moved, and long stretches where a wall was built to a plan that has since been changed twice. A track drilled on a 1 in pitch does not need the framing to be regular; it needs it to exist, which it does.

Plaster patches badly and permanently. In a flat like this the plaster is frequently the nicest surface in the room, and every hole you put in it is a decision. One line of fixings at one height is a materially different proposition from a grid of them down every column, and it is worth weighing before the drill comes out — not because the wall is fragile, but because it is original.

3. The bay window is not a shelving wall, and stop trying

The bay is the reason people move into these flats and the reason the room is hard to furnish. It is worth being blunt about what to do with it: nothing.

A bay is three or five short facets meeting at angles that are not right angles. A bay of shelving cannot turn that corner — the standards would have to sit at the joint between two facets, and the shelves would have to be trapezoids. Nobody makes that, including us, and the systems that claim to are usually asking you to accept a mitred gap.

More importantly, the bay is where the light comes from. A shelf across the glass costs you the window, and the window is what the flat is for.

What does work:

• The facets themselves, below the sill. Each one is a short, low wall, which is exactly the 42.5 in column and three shelves case — and the lowest shelf set at sill height turns the ledge into a working surface.
• The returns beside the bay. The stretches of wall on either side where the bay meets the main wall are usually 18 to 30 in wide, and they are the most overlooked storage in the flat. They also frame the bay, which is a better thing to do to a bay than fill it.
• Above the bay. The band between the head of the window and the picture rail is real wall, it is well above eye level, and it is a natural place for the things you keep but do not reach for.

The rule for the room: shelve the walls that are not the view.

4. Tall rooms, and the band nobody uses

A Victorian parlour ceiling gives you two or three feet of wall above where furniture stops. Almost every flat wastes it, because freestanding furniture that tall is a different category of object — it has to be strapped, it dominates the room, and it is very difficult to get up a staircase in a building like this.

A coupled Desh Home column is 85 in, which puts the top shelf comfortably above a door head and still leaves the crown moulding alone. If the room is taller than that, the honest answer is that the band above 85 in is a separate installation with its own track, and it is a good one — long, uninterrupted, and visible from everywhere in the room.

A word about the picture rail. It is a horizontal line already established in the room at roughly seven feet, and it is the single most useful datum in the flat: run your track so the shelf line relates to it rather than fighting it, and the installation looks like it was always there. What the picture rail is not is structure. It is trim nailed to the plaster. The Hangtrack goes into the studs, at whatever height you choose relative to that line.

5. The thing nobody in the category writes about

In San Francisco, tall furniture is a safety question, not only a design one.

Public guidance in seismic regions is consistent and long-standing: freestanding bookcases and tall storage should be secured to the structure. Anyone who has bought a bookcase has found the strap and the two screws in the carton, and in this city rather more people actually use them.

Which changes the comparison. A bookcase in San Francisco is already a thing you are being told to drill into your wall — so the choice was never "drill the wall or don't." It is a choice between a piece of furniture that stands on your floor and is screwed to your wall, and a system that is only screwed to your wall.

Two honest limits on that, because this is the section where overclaiming would be worst:

We do not publish a seismic rating and you should not infer one. What we publish is the gauge of our steel and a load figure for a bracket pair, measured statically. An earthquake is a dynamic, multi-axis event, and nothing on this page is an engineering opinion about your building. If that is your specific concern, it is a question for a structural engineer and for your building's own requirements, and it is worth asking properly.

Open shelves throw their contents. This is true of every open shelving system ever made and it is not solved by the structure being sound. The tall cantilever stands proud of the shelf surface and holds a section of books upright, which helps at the ends of a run. It is not a restraint, and the things you would be most upset to lose should not live on an open shelf at head height in this city.

What this costs

An old building charges you for every hole, twice. Once when you make it and once when you make it good. That is the argument for a single line of fixings, and it is a stronger argument here than almost anywhere — but it is still a row of holes in original plaster, and you should want that to be true rather than be talked into it.

Non-matching bays take nerve. A 36 in bay beside a 24 in one is the right answer to a wall that is 62 in wide, and it will look wrong on paper and right on the wall. If that is going to bother you, measure again and see whether one bay and an empty stretch suits you better.

The bay window stays empty. We have just spent a section telling you not to use the biggest feature in the room. That is a real cost of this advice and we think it is the correct trade.

And a Victorian is not a straight building. Nothing here makes a bent wall straight. It moves where the bend shows up — to the gap behind the shelving rather than the front edge of every shelf — which is the honest version of the claim and the reason the system suits the housing stock.

Before you drill a hundred-year-old flat

1. Inventory the walls before you shop. Clear widths and clear heights for every uninterrupted stretch, including the ones you had written off. The list decides the layout; the layout decides the parts.
2. Find the framing and confirm it. Old-growth studs take a screw well and sit where they sit. Pilot before you commit to a row.
3. Let the picture rail set the datum. Relating the shelf line to a line the room already has is most of what makes an installation look native to the building.
4. Leave the bay alone above sill height. Shelve the returns, shelve below the sill, shelve above the head. Not across the glass.
5. Ask what your building requires. In this city, securing tall storage is ordinary practice and your building may have its own rules. Better to know before the holes exist than after.

The parts this post describes: the Shelf Standards at $49, shipped as two usable 42.5 in halves — which is how a 30 in alcove and a 24 in return beside a bay window both become bays; the Shelves from $84.99 in 24 in and 36 in widths and 8, 12 and 16 in depths, mixed freely along one wall; and the 12-gauge Hangtrack at $35 and $39, drilled on a 1 in pitch because Victorian framing does not read a rulebook. Desh Home is designed and shipped from Atlanta.