Victorian terraces give you high ceilings, deep skirting boards, a chimney breast with an alcove either side of it, and a box room that has never comfortably fitted anything larger than a single bed. What they rarely give you is floor space. So the job isn't to cram more furniture in — it's to use the parts of the room you already have and aren't using: the alcoves, the air above the desk, and the awkward corners behind doors.

Everything below assumes one thing: you want to leave the plaster, cornicing and picture rail as you found them. That rules out a few shortcuts, but it doesn't limit you much.

Start with the alcoves

In most terraces, the alcoves either side of the chimney breast are the single best piece of storage real estate in the house. They're deep enough for files, tall enough for shelves, and they look deliberate once they're filled.

Measure before you decide anything. Take the width at the top, middle and bottom of the alcove and work to the smallest figure — walls in a house this age are rarely plumb, and a shelf cut to the widest measurement will either not fit or leave a gap you'll stare at for years. Check the depth at the back too, where the chimney breast return often steps in.

Then pick an approach:

• Fitted shelves cut to the alcove, sitting on timber battens fixed into the brickwork of the chimney breast and the return wall. It looks built-in, costs little, and comes out again with a bit of filling and paint.
• A freestanding unit that slots in with a few centimetres to spare, so nothing presses against the skirting. Easier to move, easier to take with you.

Leave about 35cm between shelves if you want to stand lever arch files upright, and around 30cm for box files and ring binders. Mix in a couple of shallower gaps for paperbacks and a deeper one at the bottom for a printer or a box of cables.

Use the height, not just the floor

A Victorian ceiling often runs to 2.7m or more. That's roughly a metre of wall above head height doing nothing at all. A floor-to-ceiling run on one wall — usually the alcove, sometimes the wall opposite the window — will hold more than a second bookcase would, and it takes up no extra floor.

Load it sensibly. Heavy things low, light things high: files and reference books at waist level, archive boxes, spare stationery and seasonal clutter up top. Above about 1.8m you're storing rather than working, so labelled boxes you can read from below beat a row of unmarked shoeboxes.

Keep a folding step stool or a slim two-step ladder behind the door. If you can't reach it comfortably, you won't use it, and the top shelves will quietly become a museum.

Fixings that respect old walls

Most of the damage people do to period walls isn't caused by drilling — it's caused by hanging weight off lath and plaster. The plaster is a skin, often well over a century old, and it will fail long before a decent fixing does. The rule is simple: find the brick or the timber stud, and put the load there.

• Use a stud and cable detector before you drill, and expect brick around the chimney breast and studwork in the partition walls.
• Fix battens and heavy brackets into brickwork or studs, never into plaster alone. Specialist plasterboard fixings are for lightweight jobs, not shelves full of lever arch files.
• Use the picture rail for light hanging — a small pinboard, a calendar, a couple of framed prints on proper picture hooks. Leave the rail itself in place.
• Keep the drill away from cornicing, ceiling roses and the moulded edges of a window reveal. Repairing that sort of detail is a specialist job.
• For anything heavy, spread the load across at least two fixings, and check them again a week later.

If you rent, or own a flat in a converted terrace, check your lease or ask the freeholder before fixing anything to the walls. If the building is listed or sits in a conservation area, speak to the local planning authority before making changes that affect the fabric of the building, including anything external. It's a short conversation that saves a long one later.

Furniture that earns its keep

In a small room, every piece has to do two jobs. A desk with a shallow drawer and a shelf above it replaces a desk, a filing cabinet and a wall unit. A gateleg or drop-leaf table folds flat against the wall when you're not working. A low ottoman or blanket box under the window swallows printer paper, packaging and the box of cables you'll need eventually.

Two details make the difference. First, keep the desk surface clear: if the printer can live on a wheeled trolley tucked underneath, that's where it should be. Second, leave an air gap around radiators — boxing one in looks tidy and heats the room badly.

The spaces people forget

The under-stair cupboard in a terrace is usually dark, awkward and a little damp. It can work as storage if you add a light, a shelf at waist height and something to lift things off the floor. It rarely works as a desk for long, unless you're content under a low ceiling — a cupboard with the stairs above it tends to be a place for filing, not thinking.

Also look at the window recess, the gap between the wardrobe and the door, and the box room itself. A box room with a 2.4m ceiling will take a high shelf across one wall that a modern house simply can't offer.

A workable order of things

Measure the alcoves and the wall heights. Decide what actually has to be stored — files, printer, stationery, reference books — before deciding what to buy. Fix battens or brackets into brick or stud, not plaster. Add shelves, then boxes, then labels. Live with the arrangement for a fortnight before buying anything else; the gap in your plan becomes obvious once the shelves are full.

And when you rearrange or move out, fill the old holes with a fine filler, sand lightly and touch up with the wall colour. Period walls forgive a lot, but they don't forgive a row of raw holes.