Custom Furniture in landing: A Board Game Vault

Custom Furniture at the landing turns dead staircase space into a board game vault that keeps boxes upright, dust-free and off the living-room floor — the single best use of the awkward gap most Singapore homes ignore. Whether you have an HDB storeroom nook or a landed house under-stair void, that slice of wall by the steps is prime real estate for a family that collects Catan, Ticket to Ride and the occasional 10-kilogram legacy box.

How Custom Furniture Fits the Landing Void

In a landed terrace or semi-detached home, the triangle under the staircase is the obvious spot: a carpenter can build a stepped cabinet that follows the slope, with the tallest boxes on the high side and the shallow card games tucked under the lowest step. In an HDB flat the landing is tighter, but the wall outside the bomb-shelter storeroom is often a blank stretch perfect for a floor-to-ceiling bank of shallow cubbies. The rule in HDBs is simple — you can add carpentry, but you must not hack the reinforced shelter walls or tamper with the blast door, so any fitting inside the storeroom should use minimal, reversible fixings.

Depth and Dividers That Respect the Boxes

Standard board-game boxes run 25 to 30 centimetres deep, so build the cubbies at least 32 centimetres front-to-back and you never have to stand a box on its spine. Split each column with adjustable shelves every 25 centimetres so a slim card game and a chunky dungeon-crawler both fit without wasted air. Add a lip or a shallow lip-front so nothing slides out when the landing door swings.

• Keep the lowest shelf above 30 cm from the floor to clear the skirting and the mop.
• Fit a slim LED strip on a door-contact or motion sensor, because landings are dark by nature.
• Label the cubby edges, not the boxes, so the system survives a tidy-up by the kids.

Material and the Condominium Angle

Plywood is the right core for a landing vault — it shrugs off the humidity near an HDB corridor and holds shelf pins without stripping. Paint or laminate the fronts to match the corridor so the cabinet reads as built-in rather than bolted-on. If you are in a condo, remember the MCST by-laws: no hacking of structural walls, and any noisy drilling into the common-area-adjacent wall should stay within the roughly 9 am to 5 pm weekday window, with a polite note to the neighbour whose unit backs onto yours.

Cost, Lead Time and What the Warranty Covers

A landing board-game vault roughly 1.2 metres wide and 2.4 metres tall, in laminated plywood with internal lighting, typically runs S$1,200–S$2,400. That sits comfortably inside the S$30k–S$70k scope of a full-home renovation, or stands alone as a weekend project if your place is already done. Expect the usual six-to-ten-week carpentry lead time, and a standard one-year defect warranty covering sagging shelves and faulty lights. Ask the carpenter to put the lighting driver in an accessible spot, because a buried transformer is the one thing that will eventually need swapping.

The vault pays for itself the first time you find the exact game in ten seconds instead of tripping over it by the sofa. Build it to the boxes you own now, leave one column of growth, and the landing finally earns its keep.