A Gun Room for a Forty-Gun Collection
A collection that had outgrown furniture, in a house with one room that could take it — and eight guests arriving on a shoot morning.
What we were asked for
The client came to us asking for two more cabinets. What he actually had was a room problem. Forty guns across three disciplines, a keeper and two family members who all needed access, and a shoot day six or seven times a season when guns come back wet, in a hurry, and not always their own.
Two more cabinets would have solved the storage and none of the rest of it.
What we built
A fitted room in quarter-sawn oak, racked to two walls, with a central island bench at working height. The single most useful decision was independent locking per bay: working guns in one, the pieces that come out twice a year in another, ammunition in a third. One key turn no longer opens everything.
The bench is a proper bench rather than a side table — long enough to strip two guns at once, leather-topped, with cartridge drawers on full-extension runners beneath. A short open rack at one end takes guns temporarily on a shoot morning, which is the moment a room either works or does not.
The detail that mattered most
Wet gear coming in six times a season puts more moisture into a room than anything else it will meet. The room is ventilated rather than sealed, the racking is set off the wall so air moves behind it, and the drying happens in an adjoining space rather than against the joinery. The steel is there and does its job; you do not see it.
Lead time was nineteen weeks from approved drawings. We drew it in CAD, then again at full size as a rod, before anything was cut.
A collection that has outgrown its cabinets?
Send a general list of what you own and a few wide photographs of the room. We will tell you whether the answer is more cabinets, a fitted wall or a room.
We do not publish client names, house names, street names or the detail of any security arrangement. Counties are given only where the client is content for us to do so.
This gun room was built from our approach to larger collections. See how a commission works, the specification we build to, or the standard range if a single cabinet would do.