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Aesthetically pleasing packaging

Stylish storage for emergency supplies: steamer trunks, baskets and containers that look good at home and keep kit to hand.

By Slightly Anxious

1st July 2026 13 minute read

IN SHORT

Emergency kit does not have to look like army surplus. Decide what you will store, check every space in your home from floor to ceiling, and hide it in furniture and baskets that suit your home.

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While doing our research to set up Slightly Anxious, we rapidly came to realise that much of the existing marketplace for emergency preparedness was taken up by ‘Preppers’. As a commonality they seemed to be made up of men who were once in, or obviously, desperately wanted to be in, the armed forces. They were certain the end of civilisation was imminent and a Zombie Apocalypse may well be inevitable. Accordingly, they believed people should move into their prebuilt military-style bunkers for months of isolation and kit themselves out accordingly. It does seem that for them it's about fighting the emergency rather than enduring it.

As you will have read in our article, ‘Why you’re right to feel Slightly Anxious’, we see preparing for a crisis in a rather different way. While we share the feeling that the chances of an emergency situation are more a case of ‘when’ than ‘if’, we don’t believe that the very fabric of society will be ripped asunder and nor do we believe that the undead will stalk the earth. We are almost certain that in the next emergency you need to prepare for, you will have to spend up to the maximum of a week isolating at home and possibly without mains water or electricity. At the very extreme, you may be forced to evacuate your home due to fire or flood, but in general, you will be enduring your crisis from the comfort of your home, albeit with that comfort level reduced to a level dependent on your preparedness. The better you are prepared the more comfortable you will be.

The problem with emergency kit

If you read our articles, found on our website, or look at our website, here, you will see how we try and show which devices and equipment you can purchase to prepare you and your loved ones for any kind of emergency. We really do hope you make purchases as we know it will make life easier enduring any crisis.

Obviously, we also want you to purchase so we that we can keep the lights on at Slightly Anxious towers!

While making our choices for which items to offer you, we couldn’t help but get that recurring feeling:

I know that piece of kit will be incredibly useful in enhancing my emergency preparedness but isn’t it ugly to look at! I don’t want to stare at it forever just on the off chance I will need it

It would be lovely to have a property where you have an outhouse, garage or shed or even a basement where you can neatly store away all your emergency gear. Even a dedicated storage room or cupboard is an excellent idea. You could have all the kit in labelled plastic boxes, easily found and therefore easily used.

Unfortunately, we think that this won't be the case for a lot of us. Emergency kit will have to be stashed away in whatever space we can find and here lies the problem. We think most people won’t want to have their emergency supplies ‘on display’ so will effectively hide them or even worse, not even purchase them. For some, the aesthetics of the home will take precedence of preparing for the chance of something happening in the future. If you hide things too well, they never get found and that’s especially true when you’re not around to find them. If you don’t buy the kit because its too ugly to have in the house then you will eventually be suffering in beautiful surroundings!

Storage that looks good

You may need to store a week's supplies at home
Plan what you will store first, then find the space
Audit every space from floor to ceiling, including under and on top of furniture
Water bottles fit under beds and sofas, and on the bottom of wardrobes
Decorative planters can hide water outside

Our solution

To find a solution to this problem we have come up with the idea of aesthetically pleasing packaging. This is a verbose way of saying that the solution to storing your emergency kit is to disguise it. We basically take containers and use some design panache and disguise them to be ‘objects of interest’ that if placed around your property will either seamlessly blend in or provide you with an opportunity to give a story about the contents. We leave it up to you about how true or fanciful that story is!

Steamer trunks

To give a big example, let’s start with steamer trunks. These are large vintage-style storage trunks or travel chests designed in the classic steamer-trunk tradition. They have a rectangular, reinforced construction with a rigid frame, originally inspired by the luggage used for long-distance rail and ocean travel during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Our example is the Mossman 36" Steamer Trunk, Home, Office, School Storage Solution at c.£250-£325. This provides a massive 159-litre capacity with dimensions of 91.4cm x 50.8cm x 35.6cm. These come in a variety of colours for the wooden panelling with black metal reinforced protective edging and protective bands, set off by brass looking latches, hinges and side handles. Its pretty impressive looking by itself. If you really want to push the boat out then you can swap wood for canvas and leather and get a more vintage feel with a Vintage French Steamer Trunk Console Table at c.£2,000-£3,000 which at 100cm X 39.9cm X 59.9cm which is a tad taller. These look beautiful by themselves and can be used as side/coffee tables with ample space for your emergency gear, which as they’re lockable, will stay safe from prying hands.

OUR PICK

Mossman 36" Steamer Trunk

c.£250-£325. 159 litres of storage that looks like furniture.

View on Amazon

Make it your own with AI designs

To make them even more interesting you can use AI and your crafting skills. We are sceptical fans of AI at Slightly Anxious and have seen and been impressed with its graphical abilities. You can get an AI model like Chat GPT to produce designs for wallpaper that you can stick to the panels of the steamer trunks. The trick with AI is to use a prompt to tell it what you want. The bigger trick is to get AI to tell you what the best prompt to do this is. For example, we asked Chat-GPT to ‘provide a prompt for an AI model that will generate a design that can be printed off as wallpaper - the design should be in the style of William Morris’ to which it responded with a prompt 238 words long. We then put that as a prompt into Chat-GPT and it provided us with a design so good that we couldn’t tell the difference with an original William Morris design. We did the same with Georgia O’Keefe and Frida Kahlo. However, when we tried Andy Warhol and Jack Vettriano we had issues about copyright guardrails. It appears that the more modern and more an art style is associated with just one painter, the more there is a risk of this. We just recommend playing around with artists, styles and AI models, you will succeed in the end.

Once you’ve got the right design and you’ve got it in the correct format for the people who will print it off as wallpaper. For example, Contrado.co.uk recommend you save your artwork as 200 dpi and in the TIFF format using a RGB working space. Photowall.co.uk will accept similar and different formats. Spoonflower.co.uk prefer 150 dpi in a .JPG or PNG format and sRGB colour mode. Make sure you check with your chosen printer service. Order self-adhesive wallpaper and in a couple of days a roll will turn up and you can cut and shape it to fit the panels of the trunk. An alternative, less crafty but equally creative option is just to purchase mural wallpaper from companies like WallpaperMural.com and those listed above and use their designs.

If bespoke designed wallpaper stuck onto your steamer trunk is not for you then how about some fake travel labels. Original steamer trunks would have had lots of stickers on them highlighting where and how they travelled to. The Orient Express, the Hotel Splendide and the White Star Line would have all adorned steamer trunks a century ago. Searching with AI, will help you find examples. We easily found real examples of steamship, train, hotel and even early airline travel stickers we could print off.

To further our AI fun, we got it to design some fake travel stickers instead. You can ask it to search the web and recreate authentic ones or you can, as we did, get it to search English literature for examples of fictitious countries and design travel stickers for them. We ended up with stickers for places like Ruritania (from the book/film The Prisoner of Zenda), Molvania (from the satirical Jetlag Travel Guide) and Genovia (from the book/film The Princess Diaries). You then just print them off using your laser or inkjet printer onto a matte, off white, vinyl sticker paper. You can age the stickers using cold tea or coffee and giving them a scrub with some sandpaper then apply to your trunk in a semi-random manner. Just ask AI for instructions!

Themed storage boxes

Another kind of themed container that combines ample space to store emergency kit while giving the appearance of containing something else are touring cases. Touring or flight/road cases are what bands use to move their equipment about when they go touring. They provide a heavy-duty, reinforced container designed specifically to protect delicate, high-value equipment during transport, frequent handling, and extreme touring conditions. They come filled with foam which is easier pre-cut to the shape of the equipment which its meant to hold or in little block that sit around the item. These cases look as if they are the more utilitarian cousin of the steamer trunk. They come in various sizes, such as briefcase sized: PeakTech 7300 - Carrying Case (300 x 235 x 130mm) at c.£30-£40, carry-on suitcase size: ROC Cases A030 Grey Trolley Flight Travel Case (420 x 280 x 160mm) at c.£45-£65, suitcase sized: Protekt Universal Utility Flight Case (450 x 370 x 180mm) at c.£60-£90 and steamer trunk sized: Universal Flight Case 600x400x430mm at c.£140-£180.

As with the steamer trunks above, you can customise these either with wallpaper or stickers. As they are touring cases it makes sense that your choice of sticker should be band related and you can indulge yourself here and either reproduce what you think touring cases from your favourite bands would look like or even, imagine you are the rockstar and these are your touring cases. You can get AI to search for band related stickers, such as their logos, venues/festivals and record labels. If you want to add to the authentic feel, you could make stencils of the band’s name or even just the basic utilitarian stuff like, ‘This Way Up’ and ‘Fragile’. You can really push the boat out and design it completely around your alter-ego as a rockstar in your younger days.

Picnic hampers

Another option are the self-explanatory wickerwork picnic hampers. These also come in a variety of sizes, the Traditional Premium Wicker Gift Basket With Lid (Brown) comes in small (390 x 260 x 150mm) at c.£15-£25, medium (460 x 330 x 200mm) at c.£25-£30 and large (520 x 400 x 240mm) at c.£30-£40. Wickerwork doesn’t work well with paper stickers but many a picnic hampers has had a premium brand name printed on it. You can make a stencil and use black spray paint. Make up your own fake premium brand, such as ‘Westmorland Hampers & Provisions’ or ‘Lakes Picnic Company’. We would obviously never suggest you copy a real one! Or have your initials with a coronet above them and imply you are to the manor born.

Our favourite option

Our last container option is the one which is the best for all the utilitarian reasons, they’re cheap, strong and do exactly what’s needed of them, they just look ugly and that’s plastic storage boxes. There really are too many on offer to make a recommendation but some examples are: Best House 20L - 2 PCS Clear Plastic Storage Box with Lids at c.£20-£30 or Really Useful Plastic Storage Box Bonus Pack 3x35 Litre Clear at c.£40-£50 or Wham Pack of 2 Crystal Storage Boxes with Lids, Plastic, 80L, Clear at c.£25-£30. An interesting option is to move some or all of your emergency storage outside. You should ensure that your kit is in a waterproof bag first and then use Strata Heavy Duty Large Storage Box with Lid, 110L, Lockable, Indoor/Outdoor, Wheeled, Black with Red Handles at c.£30-£40 and store in the garden, or on a balcony. If their pale plastic shapes offend your aesthetic eye, then feel free to cover in wall paper and stickers as above. We experimented with asking AI to provide us with stickers that replicated the supposed labels of evidence boxes for unsolved crimes and mysteries such as the Loch Ness Monster, who shot JFK and the truth about UFO’s. Let your creative spirit run free and remember, you can always change it.

Hiding kit in furniture

The last strategy we have for hiding emergency kit is using actual furniture. If you read our article on, 'What to do when the water is turned off’, you will see how we recommend storing bottles of water under your bed, behind the sofa or on the bottom shelf of wardrobes. We even suggest that you use decorative planters to store both potable and grey water. For indoors, we recommend that you use a storage chest or Ottoman that can be quite reasonably priced: Vasagle Storage Chest, Storage Bench with 2 Safety Hinges, Shoe Storage Bench, Modern Style, 40 x 76 x 48cm at c.£40-£55 or Brian & Dany Folding Ottoman Storage Bench with Lid, 80 x 40 x 40cm at c.£40-£60. Obviously, as with all furniture, size, design and materials will determine price and you can pay considerably more: Vintage Mid-Century Storage Ottoman Bench - Upholstered Padded Chest, 80 x 40 x 43.8cm at c.£475-£650 or Melinda Oval Tufted Bullion Fringe Storage Bench, Gold Velvet, 48.3 x 123.2 x 48.3cm at c.£600-£800. Other furniture hideaways can be found in sideboards or cabinets, console tables and built in furniture, such as understairs cupboards, built-in benches and fitted cabinetry.

OUR PICK

Vasagle Storage Chest

c.£40-£55. A bench to sit on, with kit hidden inside.

View on Amazon

Where to start

We suggest that you get your planning hat on and decide on what your emergency storage kit will consist of first and work out the types of items, their size and shape and how many of them you have to store. Then do an audit of all the places in your household that you can store things. Do this from the floor up to the ceiling, so you include storing under things and on top of things as well. Then do a first take and put the items in their places and see if they fit. Then work out if they need to be put in a container and if so, does it need making beautiful. You may also want to keep a record of where you have stored stuff so you don’t forget.

The Slightly Anxious website will be kept updated with new ideas on aesthetically pleasing packaging and we may well sell some, already decorated and we may well sell the decorations (stickers etc.) if there is enough demand for it.

Storage options compared

Option

Example

Guide Price

Wicker hamper

Traditional Premium Wicker Basket (small to large)

c.£15-£30+

Storage bench or ottoman

Vasagle Storage Chest

c.£40-£55

Flight case

ROC Cases A030 Trolley Case