Wall-mounted Basket at www.japanese-home-gardens.com

Kitchen clutter is tidied away into cupboards leaving a shelf and surfaces clear for decorative pieces that are key to this room's success. A wall-mounted basket is a great plant holder, while the patterned plates and shapely vases and pots add to the African feel.

More permanent installations require their own housings and these types are characterised by the basket strainer. Here, a suitably strengthened wire mesh or perforated plate shaped into a basket is placed inside a sealed housing through which the feed stream flows under pressure. In simplex systems the flow continues until the strainer is clogged with the unwanted solids. At this point the flow is interrupted and the basket is manually changed.

Since the hallways and stairways are often thought of as the connecting bits between the "real" rooms of the house, their full potential as storage areas is usually not realized. Mounted on the Wall above the front door, for example, you could construct an out-of-the-way storage cupboard. Or, if the stairs are comfortably wide, you may be able to build a set of bookshelves on the wall, and be able to choose books at different heights as you ascend or descend the stairs.