Fitted Wardrobes Price Guide Berkshire: Real Costs per Linear Metre

A standard painted MDF fitted wardrobe with hinged shaker doors, basic internal hanging and shelf layout, and simple bar handles runs £800–£1,200 per linear metre installed. A mid-range specification with sliding mirror doors, a mix of hanging and drawer sections, and quality Blum soft-close hardware runs £1,200–£1,800 per metre. A premium specification — two-tone paint finish, bespoke internal layout with pull-out shoe drawers and velvet-lined jewellery sections, and a hand-painted cornice and plinth — runs £1,800–£2,800 per metre. These are fully installed figures including materials and labour.

The biggest cost driver beyond the obvious specification is access difficulty. Wardrobes in loft conversions, rooms with angled ceilings, or properties where materials must be carried up three flights of stairs carry a premium. Floor and wall preparation — scribing to uneven plaster, building up unlevel floors before fitting — also adds time and cost. The internal hardware package is often the most underestimated element: a full complement of quality drawer runners, pull-out shoe racks, and tie rails from Blum or Hettich can add £300–£600 to the internal cost of a single bay.

Every quote I produce starts with a measuring visit, and there’s a reason I won’t give a firm price without one. Walls in most Berkshire homes are neither straight nor plumb. I measure the opening width at floor, waist, and ceiling height, check the floor for level with a laser, and note everything that will interrupt the run — skirting profiles, coving, radiator pipework, and sockets or switches that need moving or boxing in. Ten minutes with a tape and a level at this stage saves half a day of improvisation during the fit, and it is the only honest basis for a fixed price.

From those measurements I build a cutting list and a written specification: carcass material and thickness, door construction and finish, hinge and runner counts, the internal fittings bay by bay, and the number of fitting days. The price is assembled from that specification line by line — materials, hardware, workshop time, on-site time, and finishing. If a quote you receive is a single figure on one page with no specification behind it, you have no way of knowing what you are actually buying, and no comeback when the internals turn out to be a single rail and one shelf per bay.

On a typical fully bespoke wardrobe, sheet materials are usually the smallest of the three main cost blocks. Labour — workshop machining, assembly, and the on-site fit — is the largest, which is why access problems and awkward rooms move the price more than an extra sheet of MDF ever will. The finishing system sits between the two: a sprayed door produced in controlled workshop conditions carries workshop time, while a hand-painted finish applied on site can add two or more days of labour on its own.

Hardware is the block people consistently underestimate. A bank of four drawers costs several times what four shelves in the same space would, because every drawer is a box, a pair of runners, a front, and an hour or more of fitting and adjustment. When one quote comes in dramatically cheaper than another for what looks like the same wardrobe, the difference is almost always hiding in the hardware count and the finish system, not in the carcass.

Take a plain 2.4m wall, floor to ceiling, and run it through the benchmarks above. At the basic specification — painted MDF carcass, hinged shaker doors, a rail and shelf per bay — the £800–£1,200 per metre range puts the job at roughly £1,900–£2,900 fully installed. Move to the mid-range specification, with sliding mirror doors, a proper mix of hanging, drawers, and shelving, and Blum soft-close hardware throughout, and the same wall lands between about £2,900 and £4,300.

Push on to the premium specification — two-tone paintwork, pull-out shoe drawers, lined jewellery trays, scribed cornice and plinth — and that identical 2.4m of wall reaches £4,300–£6,700. Nothing about the wall changed. Every pound of the difference is specification, which is exactly why comparing two quotes by their bottom line alone tells you almost nothing about which is better value.

The door style and its finish move the final figure more than any other single decision. A flat slab door in a painted finish is the cheapest to produce. A shaker door adds machining and assembly time. Raised-panel, inset, or beaded profiles add more again, because each extra detail is workshop hours. On sliding systems the gear itself matters as much as the panel: budget bottom-rolling kits are cheap, but they collect debris and jump their tracks, while quality top-hung gear costs meaningfully more and still runs sweetly after ten years of daily use.

Finish is the other half of the swing. A sprayed finish needs equipment, a dust-free space, and drying time between coats, but arrives on site ready to hang. Hand-painting on site suits period properties where a slightly softer brushed finish looks right, but it adds days to the programme. Mirror and glass inserts add material cost and careful handling. None of these are wrong choices — they simply need to be priced deliberately at the design stage rather than discovered on the final invoice.

Before weighing one bottom line against another, check that each quote answers the same questions in writing:

• Carcass material and thickness — 18mm minimum, moisture-resistant MDF on external walls
• Whether backs are solid fixed panels or thin loose infills
• Door construction, the finish system, and who applies it
• Hinge and runner brand, plus the exact drawer count
• Scribing to walls, cornice, plinth, and end panels — included or extra
• Making good, waste removal, and disposal of any old wardrobes
• VAT position, deposit terms, and lead time

Anyone pricing seriously will answer all of these without hesitation. Where the answers are vague, the gaps get resolved on site — either at your expense as extras, or through quiet cuts in quality that you never agreed to.

There are honest ways to trim a wardrobe budget without regretting it. Melamine-faced board for internal shelving and drawer boxes saves money with no real-world penalty, because those surfaces live behind closed doors. Standard bar or knob handles cost a fraction of specials and date better than most trend pieces. Swapping drawers for shelves where drawers are not genuinely needed is the single biggest saving available, and simplifying the door profile from a detailed panel to a plain shaker trims workshop hours without changing the character of the room.

Three places I would never cut: the hinges and runners, because they are the moving parts that take twenty years of daily use; moisture-resistant board against external walls, because standard MDF against a cold wall invites trouble; and the scribing. Skipping the scribed fit to save a day leaves shadow gaps against every wall — gaps that collect dust, read as cheap from across the room, and cannot be caulked convincingly on a wavy Victorian wall.

The most common mistake is budgeting from the doors outward — choosing a look from a photograph and assuming the interior will sort itself out. The interior is where the daily usefulness lives and where a large share of the cost sits, so it should be designed and priced first. The second mistake is assuming a flat-pack carcass plus a good fitter equals a bespoke wardrobe at half the price. The fitter can only work with the module sizes in the box, so you still get the wasted strips of dead space at the ends of the run and a carcass built down to a price.

The third is treating the cheapest quote as the benchmark and asking everyone else to match it, rather than asking why it is cheap. A wardrobe is fitted joinery fixed to your walls for the next two decades. The gap between the cheapest and the best quote, spread over that period, is usually a small number of pounds per month — and the difference in what you live with every morning is anything but small.

A properly built fitted wardrobe costs close to nothing to run. Expect one round of hinge and runner adjustment within the first year as the joinery settles through a full heating season — five minutes with a screwdriver per door. Hand-painted finishes benefit from a refresh coat after eight to ten years of use; sprayed finishes generally go longer and wipe clean in the meantime. Rails, runners, and hinges from the quality brands are serviceable parts, so a worn component years down the line is a small replacement, not a rebuild.

Set that against the alternative. A budget flat-pack wardrobe replaced twice over the same twenty-year period, with delivery, assembly, and disposal each time, narrows the true cost gap dramatically — and at resale, fitted storage is an asset where a tired freestanding unit is a removal cost. Priced per year of service rather than per invoice, well-specified bespoke joinery is consistently the cheaper way to store your clothes.