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Abstract: The recent reassessment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century shops as sophisticated retail spaces, constructed to encourage sales, communicate key messages about the trader, and facilitate browsing, has tended to obscure its relationship with the rest of the building in which it was located – most often the shopkeeper’s home. Indeed, we know relatively little about how the shop was accommodated within the physical and social spaces of the house, or about the implications this had for the character and use of other rooms. This paper draws on evidence from probate inventories drawn from across the Midlands and north-west England to argue that divisions between public and private, commercial and domestic were blurred: the meaning and identity of space was contingent on use rather than being fixed. It begins by assessing the ways in which the various rooms of shopkeepers’ houses were used for production, storage and selling. Discussion then moves to a consideration of the implications that these specialist spaces and storage practices had for the remainder of the house. Here, analysis focuses on the naming of these rooms and the location of key decorative items. Relating these findings back to earlier findings concerning the innovative nature of tradesmen as consumers, the paper argues that many shopkeepers were, in practice, furnishing their domestic space as commercial space.