Built-In Furniture

Built-in furniture is measured to the room it stands in rather than assembled from stock widths, which is the difference between a wardrobe that reaches the ceiling and one that leaves a gap collecting dust above it. A sloping ceiling, a wall that is not square, a chimney breast or a beam are all things a freestanding piece has to work around and a built-in piece can simply absorb. The same applies to depth: a shallower run along a narrow wall keeps a room usable where a standard cabinet would not.

This is the practical reason to have the wardrobe made by the people who made the kitchen. The same veneer, the same lacquer, the same hinges and runners, drawn to the same tolerances and finished on the same benches. In an open-plan house where a kitchen tall bank is visible from the living room and a media unit sits ten metres away, matching them later across two suppliers is close to impossible, because two workshops rarely mean the same thing by the same colour reference. Specified together and made together, they read as one interior rather than as two purchases.

A wardrobe or a vanity goes through the same process as a kitchen: we measure the room and take the brief, issue a design proposal, agree the materials, fabricate the piece in our workshop and install it. Nothing is ordered until the drawings and the finishes are confirmed. The advantage of running a built-in project alongside a kitchen is that the measuring, the material selection and the installation happen once rather than three times, and the finishes are matched at the specification stage rather than afterwards.