A curving wall … with eight hollow-core doors

This sweep of storage, featuring a graceful fan of doors, lets Phoenix architect Richard Fairbourn incorporate a normally costly element-a curved wall-into his design at a fraction of the cost. A curving wall section full of storage would have been expensive, with custom-made curved doors and tricky door frames.

Instead, eight 2-foot-wide hollow-core doors arc across his bedroom. Each overlaps the adjacent door by 2 inches, pivoting on spring pin pivot hinges set into the curved plywood base and header. Magnetic catches on the doors and under the header hold the doors closed. Each door opens to reveal a roughly 2-foot-wide section; any number can be opened at once. To organize his clothes, Fairbourn bought a coated-wire shelf with hanging rod (from a readily available wire closet system). To allow the rod and shelf to bend to match the curve of the closet, he snipped out sections from the shelf's back and middle wires (see smaller picture). Next, starting at one end, he rested the shelf on ledgers screwed into the closet's side and back walls, bending the wire as he went. Diagonal braces run down from the front of the shelf to the wall at spacing specified by the system's manufacturer.