Custom Fitted Wardrobes & Dressing Rooms

Every job I take on follows the same four stages: survey, design, workshop build, and fitting. The survey comes first because nothing sensible can be priced from a phone photo. I measure the wardrobe wall at several heights, check the walls for plumb and bow, check the floor for level, and note everything the design has to work around — skirting and coving profiles, sockets and switches, radiators, window reveals, loft hatches. In older Berkshire houses I regularly find walls 15–20mm out of true over a door height; the design has to know that before anything is cut.

The design stage is a conversation, not a catalogue. We talk through what you actually own — how much hanging, how much folded storage, how many pairs of shoes — because the interior layout matters more to daily life than the doors do. You get a drawing and a fixed quote, and nothing goes to the workshop until you are happy with both.

The build happens in the workshop, where machinery cuts square and finishes are sprayed and cured properly — most of the project’s lead time sits here. The fitting is the short bit: typically two to four days on site. Carcasses go in first, levelled on adjustable feet and fixed back to the wall through solid rails; then end panels and fillers are scribed to your walls and ceiling; then doors are hung and adjusted, and the internals — rails, shelves, drawers — go in last. Your bedroom is disrupted for that fitting window only, and it is habitable every evening.

Fitted wardrobe pricing confuses people because two quotes for “the same wall” can differ by half. The width of the run matters, obviously, but the real drivers are inside and on the front. Drawers are the most expensive storage per item — each one needs a machined box, a matching front and a pair of quality runners, so a bank of four can add roughly a third to the cost of an otherwise simple bay. Hanging rails and adjustable shelves, by contrast, are the cheapest storage per garment you can buy. Door choice is the other big lever: melamine and simple painted doors sit at the sensible end; sprayed finishes, glazing, mirror and veneer move things up from there.

If the budget needs trimming, trim in the right order. Keep the hardware quality — Blum or Hettich hinges and runners are the parts you touch every day, and three drawers that glide beat five that grind. Keep the layout, because a sensible hanging-to-drawer ratio costs nothing and is worth more than any single upgrade. Save instead on the interior finish, which nobody sees when the doors are shut, and on accessories like pull-out mirrors and tie racks that get used less than people expect. My price guide in the grid above breaks all of this down per linear metre; the freestanding-versus-bespoke guide covers whether fitted work is the right investment for your situation at all.

Doors are ninety per cent of what you see, so they deserve a deliberate decision rather than a default. The first fork is sliding versus hinged, and it is mostly a floor-space question: hinged doors need clear swing room but give you the whole bay at once and take internal drawers more happily; sliders suit tight rooms where a door swing would foul the bed, at the cost of always covering one bay. The second fork is style. Shaker-style frames suit Berkshire’s period stock and barn conversions and take paint beautifully; flat slab doors in sprayed or veneered finishes read contemporary; mirrored doors are the single most effective way to make a small bedroom feel larger and brighter.

There are dedicated guides above on all three of those forks — sliding versus hinged, mirrored doors, and Shaker styles — but the short version of my advice is this: choose the door system for the room’s geometry first, the style for the house second, and fashion a distant third. A wardrobe is a twenty-year piece; the safest choices are the ones that will still look right two redecorations from now.

Nobody regrets their door choice a year in; plenty of people regret their interior. The layout should start from an audit of what you own — count the long-hanging items, the short-hanging items, the folded piles, the shoes — and be designed to those numbers plus around 20% headroom for growth. Most wardrobes want a mix of double-hang for shirts and jackets, a bay of full-length hanging for coats and dresses, a graduated drawer bank, and adjustable shelving. Shoes deserve their own zone rather than the wardrobe floor, whether that is simple angled shelves with a heel rail or a full pull-out tray tower.

The interior guides in the grid above go deep on each element: hanging-to-drawer ratios, pull-out shoe systems, tie and belt organisers, hidden dressing tables, and internal lighting. If you read only one, make it the internal storage layouts guide — the hanging and drawer arithmetic in it applies to every wardrobe I build, whatever the doors look like. And if a walk-in is on your mind, start with the dimensions guide before falling for the photographs: a walk-in needs roughly 1.8m of clear internal width to work, and below that a well-planned reach-in wardrobe serves you better every single morning.

The rooms that defeat flat-pack furniture are exactly the rooms where bespoke work earns its keep, and they have their own guides above. Corners waste 300–500mm of storage in each direction unless the junction is designed properly — an L-shaped return, a carousel, or honest fixed shelving in the void. Sloped ceilings in loft conversions defeat freestanding wardrobes entirely, but purpose-built angled carcasses turn the eaves into some of the best storage in the house. Victorian alcoves either side of a chimney breast are natural wardrobe bays that no standard-width unit will ever fit, and new-build box rooms are so tight that using the full height and every millimetre of width is the only way the room works at all.

The common thread in all of them is measurement. Awkward spaces are never square — alcoves differ side to side, corner angles drift a few degrees, rooflines wander — so I template the worst of them on site and build the difference into scribed panels. The doors and fronts end up perfectly plumb and aligned; the wonky wall does its wandering out of sight behind the carcass. That is the whole craft of fitted work, and it is why the awkward rooms often end up with the most satisfying results.

Berkshire has an unusually wide spread of property types, and the right wardrobe differs across them. In the Victorian and Edwardian houses around Ascot, Sunninghill and Reading, the alcoves set the design: fitted wardrobes flanking the chimney breast, hinged Shaker-style doors, cornice details that nod to the room’s existing mouldings, and careful ventilation on the cold external walls those houses always have. In the barn conversions out towards the villages, exposed beams and irregular walls call for painted Shaker fronts and generous scribing — and often a frameless glass or open section where a beam refuses to be boxed in.

New-build estates in Bracknell, Wokingham and Warfield pose the opposite problem: straight walls but small rooms. There the job is extracting maximum storage from minimum footprint — floor-to-ceiling carcasses, sliding or mirrored doors to save swing space and borrow light, and interiors planned to the centimetre. Loft conversions, common across the whole county, add raking ceilings to the mix. There are location-specific guides in the grid above for new-builds in Bracknell, barn-conversion door styles, and the premium end of the market in Sunningdale and Sunninghill; if your property fits one of those, start there — the advice is tuned to the actual housing stock.

Materials conversations get needlessly mystified, so here is the honest version. Interior carcasses are usually 18mm melamine-faced chipboard — stable, wipe-clean, takes shelf pins and runner screws well, and keeps money away from parts nobody sees. Anything painted is MR MDF, the moisture-resistant grade, because bedroom walls see enough humidity swing to matter. Drawer boxes are birch ply, which holds screws properly and shrugs off decades of use. Doors and visible end panels are where better materials earn their money: painted MDF for most rooms, veneer or solid timber where the budget and the house justify it.

What matters more than any board choice is the hardware and the fit. Blum or Hettich hinges and runners are rated for tens of thousands of cycles and their spare parts stay available for decades, which makes the wardrobe maintainable rather than disposable. Proper edge banding, scribed panels and accurate machining are the difference between joinery and boxes. The carcass materials guide above goes deeper on MDF versus ply versus melamine if you want the detail before talking to any fitter.

Whoever you talk to, the same short list of questions will tell you which end of the market you are in. Ask what the carcass material is — the answer should be a thickness and a grade, like 18mm MFC or MR MDF, not a brand name and a shrug. Ask whose hinges and runners are fitted; Blum and Hettich are good answers, silence is not. Ask whether panels are scribed to the walls or whether gaps are covered with filler strips. Ask who actually does the installation — the person who measured, or a subcontract crew who have never seen your room. And ask what the guarantee covers and what happens when a runner fails in year eight.

Vague answers to any of those are the tell. A good fitter enjoys these questions because the honest answers are the sales pitch; a bad one changes the subject to the showroom finance offer. I would also encourage you to ask to see photographs of scribing details and interiors, not just glamour shots of door fronts — the quality of a fitted wardrobe lives in the junctions. If you would like to put any of these questions to me directly, the quote button at the top of this page is the place to start, and the survey visit costs you nothing but an hour.