My wife and I are just about to relocate to the seaside, Lyme Regis in fact, and I will be looking to develop my bespoke fitted furniture contacts in that neck of the woods.

Dorset has a very long tradition of artisan craftsmen, Thomas Hardy’s family were carpenters, roofers and bricklayers, Mary Anning’s father was a cabinet maker and John Makepiece, possibly England’s finest living furniture maker, is based at Parnham House near Beaminster so, as you would expect, the county is full of individual bespoke furniture makers turning out fine quality hand-crafted real wood furniture.

However, I’ll warrant that most of that craftsmanship finds its way out of Wessex and is gracing boardrooms and grand houses throughout the UK and worldwide.

So what can Options Fitted Furniture bring to the party? Options fill a unique niche in the home furnishing market by offering good quality, middle price range, custom made bedroom, home study and living room cabinetry at prices that are competitive with mass production manufacturers but with the flexibility of  one-off production, making every installation unique and special without costing the earth.

All the big name players in this industry are active in Dorset and the county is well served by makers of fine quality bespoke furniture but for thousands of west country home makers who struggle to make their aspirations fit their budgets the Options’ method might just fit the bill.

As Mary Portas will attest, one of the most difficult tasks in retailing is to keep your staff motivated. The problem is exacerbated with high ticket items such as fitted kitchens, fitted bedrooms and home study/offices. Average orders will be in the region of £5,000  to £20,000 and the showroom may only need to generate one or two orders a week to meet its marketing targets on top of its value as a resource facility. Two orders may require four home visits and quotations and four such appointments might result from eight new showroom visits, not much more than one per day on a good week.

Showroom staff are, generally, not highly paid, career orientated individuals; so sitting in a shop for up to eight hours a day will often induce what I call ’showroom stupor’ and when a visitor does appear it can be difficult to get your mind in gear, lay down your newspaper, book or crossword and engage sufficiently with that precious prospective new client in the first few vital seconds that can avoid a missed opportunity.

What fitted furniture and other home improvement businesses must do to avoid these tragically wasted chances is not only train their showroom staff but incentivise them; and pecuniary rewards are usually the biggest incentive  of all either at a price per appointment or for meeting a target. The danger here is that an over zealous showroom assistant will upset prospective clients by badgering them to make an appointment or will produce lots of poor quality leads that disincentivise the designers. By far the best practice is to find your reception staff other clerical or customer liaison duties that keep their brains active and avoid the showroom stupor whilst giving them a bonus based on the total number of sales per month from new clients.

Better still, build your showroom next to your fitted furniture production facility or workshop and merge the customer service and sales roles, spend what you save on High Street costs on advertising or website optimisation to induce your clients to visit the showroom where parking is probably a lot easier anyway. Your customers will enjoy the closeness to the manufacturing facility, you can even incorporate factory tours into the sales process, and your showroom staff will have the opportunity to share the whole ordering through to fulfillment process and feel much more valued.

In an interesting article in the April edition of KBB Review, a trade magazine for the fitted furniture industry, Tim Foley reports on a visit that he and his wife made to a ‘nice looking’ retail showroom in Gloucestershire, where they were greeted after some delay, by a ‘well groomed woman (who) emerged from the room below’ and advised them that ‘yes it was’ okay to look around, then, after saying ‘let me know if you need anything’ disappeared back downstairs from whence she came.

After being left to their own devices for around ten minutes, the couple called down the stairs to thank the showroom assistant and left.

If you have any idea of the cost of  bespoke fitted furniture,  you will know that to fit out a showroom with displays of kitchens and bedroom wardrobes and drawer units requires considerable investment let alone the on-cost of heating, lighting maintaining and staffing of said emporium.

Why on earth would the owner(s) have made such an investment, presumably with the main intention of encouraging members of the general public to make appointments with a designer in order to obtain designs and quotations that would, in some instances, have led on to orders – the life blood of any business – being placed for the supply and installation of new fitted kitchens, bathrooms, fitted bedrooms and home study/offices; and then have the business of making said appointments in the hands of somebody so under trained and/or motivated as to let an opportunity slip away?

Perhaps the business generates sufficient sales from personal recommendations – which should be the primary source of any home improvement business – without needing new enquiries from the showroom; but, if so, why waste precious resources on a showroom at all? If the showroom just serves as a resource for customers to choose their designs, finishes, door types, worktops handles and appliances, why bother to undertake the expense of a high street premises when all you need is somewhere adjacent to your workshop, warehouse or factory on a trading estate?

Most likely, the owner is unaware of what is happening at his shiny new showroom and bewails the apparent low level of interest.

I will return to this topic next week.

Back to Kevin McCloud’s excellent book 43 Principles of Home.

Kevin’s principle number 27 is “Buy Authentic, buy only stuff that is made in a firm’s own factories where they look after the people they employ and the place where they are based”. Can we apply this advice to the purchase of bespoke fitted furniture for the home and if so why?

In part Kevin is speaking out against slave labour production in India and the far east, and who would not support him in that? He also refers to the carbon impact of importing manufactured goods from around the world. Obviously, you would not expect your made to measure fitted wardrobes to fall into those two categories – although I can’t be certain that some of the larger fitted bedroom and home office suppliers aren’t outsourcing abroad, they do shift standard size doors in large volume so the option must be open to them.

The relevant point in K Mc’s article is the sense of authenticity and pride in ownership that comes from buying hand-crafted products made in a small workshop and the connection with the craftsmen who make and install your furniture. He does live on a slightly different planet to the majority of us, being a highly successful television presenter, author and businessman and his propensity to extol the virtues of only buying the finest quality, ethically produced, organic and hand knitted products does seperate him from a large section of the Grand Designs audience; who must be average-income, wage-slaves like me; who’s life styles would become much constrained if we had to choose between a unique, hand-forged, wrought iron table lamp or a B&Q £20.00, imported equivalent plus a couple of opera/football tickets. The former giving employment to one worthy master crafstsman in a nearby village and the latter supporting the infrastructure that employs thousands of needy shop workers in the UK, many employees along an extensive supply chain and exploits but keeps from starvation a family in Indonesia or Somalia, as well as maintaining the whole panoply of people employed in providing our entertainments from sport to culture. Complex questions!

However, like Kevin, I have moving testimonials from clients who take great pride in their bespoke furniture that I and my colleagues have helped them to conceive and realise and who take satisfaction from the fact that they have seen the workshop in which it was made and enjoy the uniqueness and authenticity of their bespoke product.

Sorry, I got a bit distracted there blogging about things that caught my attention on TV and in Kevin McCloud’s book; 43 Principles of  Home. I must gt back to my theme of looking at the options for new fitted bedroom furniture or fitted wardrobes.

We discussed the DIY and flat-pack options, both of which are popular and practical as long as you  are aware of the limitations.

The third option is to consult with one or more of the professional design, build and fit companies. These are easy to find in the pages of newspaper supplements and home-interest magazines or by googling ‘fitted furniture’. This will give you the choice of about one and a half million hits!

So, how do you sort through so many websites to find the fitted furniture supplier for you? Firstly, add a regional suffix to your search criteria; such as ‘fitted furniture Surrey’. That should leave you with a managable number of around 50,000, although, you probably won’t go far beyond the 1st or 2nd page .  Or you could add a more specific prefix such as ‘bespoke’ fitted furniture.

The next thing to do is to consider what the types of hit can tell you about the companies that appear. The first three links at the top of the page and those on the right hand side are PPC or pay-per-click adverts, if you click on one of these a small sum of money, say 10p to a pound or two, will be charged to the advertiser and eventually to you the consumer.

You may then see some local ‘place’ links that are another revenue raising idea of Google’s and can be helpful if you wish to confine your search to a very localised area, remember: Google knows where you are!

The next links are the ‘organic’ or ‘generic’ listings which will take you to the websites that Google has explored and concluded that they contain information relevant to your search, arranged in descending order of relevance. These rankings are chosen by Google by objective analysis of the content but do not indicate a recommendation.

Next up: web search directories.

First let me set out my position on Kevin McCloud: I am a fan. I love Grand Designs, I think his TV presenting style is excellent and I admire his vision and commitment to sustainability and craftsmanship. I even enjoyed his recent rattling of the fitted kitchen industry’s cage by declaring that there is little intrinsic difference in quality between a £5,000 kitchen and one costing ten times as much. Much of the ‘designer’ end the fitted furniture market is  bit ‘up itself’ and can onlybenefit from having its poposity pricked.

I have a copy of Kevin’s beautifully designed (of course) coffee table book 43 Principles of Home which, whilst a little heavy for a bedtime read is great for dipping into – I might even keep it in my beautifully designed downstairs loo – his writing is as erudite and apparently effortless as his presenting (apart from one glaring error, where he says ‘you could not do worse than, where what he means is ‘you could do worse than’, for which I blame his editors).

However, the section on toxic chemicals in your home did scare the hell out of me and almost had me running screaming from the house. Up to now my biggest concern has been a section of lead mains water pipe that I have been suspecting of poisoning me and my family for the past 30 years; that is until KMcC assured me that it will be so heavily coated with a lead-calcite lining that the deposition of lead into the drinking water is probably negligible.

However, it now appears that it’s not my water pipes that are poisoning me but my UPVC windows; which not only threaten to last forever, unless destroyed by a planet polluting  fire, but are leaching deadly toxins into the air I breath.

Similarly, my cabinet furniture, fitted and otherwise, is a source of carcinogenic formaldehyde from the chipboard and MDF used in its production. Kevin doesn’t mention the cancer causing agents in hardwoods that used to kill cabinets makers of old.

He doesn’t ask that the use of modern materials in fitted furniture production be banned or even avoided but he does strees that we sholuld ensure that as far as possible all the cut edges are covered up. Don’t use raw mdf or chipboard for shelving and preferably ensure that it is veneered, lacquered or laminated.

I thought of the ramifications of not using UPVC as a construction material, Kevin would rather that we made our houses from straw bales and timber, and reflected on my childhood in a Victorian terraced house in London. The house was cold and damp all through the winter with just a coal burning fire (more toxins) in the living room. Every couple of years Dad would sand down the window frames, no doubt releasing lead from the old paintwork, and redecorate with gloss paint that would smell for weeks while it dried slowly probably generating more pollutants. Adequate ventilation was never a problem in that draughty house but we all suffered back to back head colds through the winter.

Whether environmental health problems contributed to the cancer that ended my mother’s life at 56 I will never know. Dad made it to 89 before the emphysema from a lifetime of dedication to John Player’s Navy Cut tobacco carried him off.

I expect to outlive my father but now that I come to think of it, I will have to find something to die of. Seems to me that life is carcenagenic in one way or another and whether it’s cancer or heart disease that gets me in the end, and whether my furniture or my windows are to blame or not, I will have enjoyed the comforts that modern building materials bring to ordinary people in ordinary houses and I am unlikely to be felled by hypothermia or TB.

Don’t you just love Mary Portas’ TV programme Secret Shopper? She’s as cuddly as a piranha but she makes great television. She’s not always right but she believes that she is and she probably is most of the time, she has certainly got class and can really shake the complacency out of some of the UK’s lazy and introspective retailers. I would have loved to see her doing the same to all those giants of the fitted bedroom and home office furniture market that have constant half price sales.

Estate agents were a bit of a sitting target but she certainly hit the nail on the head with sofa retailers and it was fascinating to see all the big chains like DFS running for the hills and only the Johnnie-come-lately group FCS (what is it with sofa shops and initials?) prepared to take her on. I was delighted to see that the FCS managing director, who obviously runs a tight ship; as evidenced by his sales staff’s strict adherence to the annoyingly precise script when greeting visitors to the company’s stores, was prepared to listen and then to dispense with those 50% off lies that the mainstream retail furniture industry is infested with.

When I worked for the now defunct Times Furnishing chain we had two sales a year, one in January and the other in July, when we genuinely reduced the price of showroom stock, some of it tired or soiled, or just plain discontinued. Admittedly, we boosted the two week sale by buying in some specialy discounted lines that manufacturers would produce in a limited range of upholstery colours or in the case of bedroom wardrobes and chests of drawers in a cheaper wood veneers (foils, vinyls and laminates were rare or non-existant in those days) but these bought in sale lines were always billed as ’special purchase’. What we did not do was constantly insult the buying public’s intelligence with false claims of 50% discounts and special offers.

Mind you, I do sometimes wonder about the great British public’s collective intelligence; clearly chains like DFS, Furniture Village and Sharps Bedrooms, who persist in their mendacious claims are still highly profitable. Whilst interviewing shoppers  outside the now ingenuous FCS, and generally receiving plaudits, Mary heard one punter say: ‘I’m going over to DFS because they’ve got a sale on.

I sincerely hope that FCS prosper and I will certainly be paying them a visit the next time that I am in the market for a sofa.

I am very proud to be in the bespoke fitted furniture market and in spite of the fact that a lot of major competitors tell lies about their pricing policies, most of the independent companies serving this industry do play it straight and offer genuine value for money.

Before moving on from the DIY option for your new fitted bedroom furniture I would urge you to look at my post for 23 June 2010 How to avoid mould in fitted bedroom furniture and to think very seriously about putting backs on your fitted wardrobes.

The second, and less challenging, option is to look at the array of flat-packs available from stores such as Homebase and Ikea. Ikea, for example, offer excellent value for money and provided you can make their fixed door widths, of 500 mm for a hinged door and 700 mm for a slider, combined with fixed depths and heights work in your spaces, this route need not cost a lot more than the full DIY alternative and will cerainly save you a lot of mess and hastle.

Flat-pack furniture is not as robust as professionally made bespoke fitted furniture and will be far more limited in the range of styles and finishes, but for the vast majority  of home owners this is the route most often taken, if only for reasons of affordability.

People extending, improving or upgrading their homes will usually have to set themselves priorities and often the fitted bedroom will have to wait in line behind the fitted kitchen, refurbished bathroom, landscaped garden, new carpets and replacement windows. However, and unless you plan to keep your clothes in those natty cardboard storage units provided by the removal companies, you will need wardrobes in short order. The alternatives will often be the storage rails on wheels (like these) secondhand wardrobes or cheap flat-packs from the home improvement sheds.

You may not get the luxury bedroom you aspire to in the short term but the self asembly compromise should give you up to five years service, during which time you will will be able to formulate you requirements whilst saving up for the day you can afford to call in a professinal fitted furniture specialist like Options Fitted Furniture.

This time you will be spending thousands rather than hundreds of pounds and this time you need to be absolutely certain that you have made the right choices.

More on this topic next week.

On my last post I talked about how to design a fitted bedroom and considered how we might make your dream come true. The first option that I want to look at is the DIY route.

Frankly, unless you are a passionate amateur cabinet maker, I would advise buying your drawer units and bedside cabinets ready made from a shop or explore the secondhand option with a view to personalising your finds with some painting and distressing for the popular shabby chic-look.

The area where the DIY might be worth considering is the fitted wardrobes. First decide on whether you want sliding or hinged doors and have a look at what doors are available from your local home-improvement shed. Alternatively, you can find wardrobe doors by Googling; these are likely to be wood effect, vynil wrapped mdf and will probably come in standard sizes.

Having chosen your wardrobe doors, you will need to decide on the carcassing or framing. A popular do it yourself option is to make the interior shelving from laminated particle board, popular name Conti Board which some of the larger sheds or timber merchants will cut to size. This board is available in a range of sizes, up to 2 metres by 60 cm, ready edged, which is ideal for shelving and carcassing. Many of the larger DIY sheds offer a cut to length service, so I suggest that you design your wardrobe interior on paper and order your boards ready cut.

You will probably need to ’scribe’ some of the boards to fit to your walls; this is done by offering the board to the wall and using a drawing compass to to follow the line of the wall whilst marking a pencil line on the board and cutting with a jig saw. Use a down-cut jigsaw blade to acheive a neat edge from following the pencil line. Avoid cutting along the length of the board on any edge that is not going to be hidden by abutting the wall; such edges will require edging, which can be done with iron-on melamine edging, but be warned that this type of edging is not very durable and is likely to come away from the edges and is extremely brittle and prone to crack. Unfortunately, the better quality PVC edgings used by modern manufacturers of kitchen and bedroom furniture can only be applied with a multi-thousand pound edge banding machine and is not generally available to the DIY market.

Other options for the shelving or carcassing are mdf or plywood which will need painting.

I would recommend buying a good DIY manual that has a section on making your own wardrobes and be prepared for mess and upheaval lasting over several weeks.

Having designed the layout for your fitted bedroom, firstly we positioned the bed and then decided where to put the wardrobes and low level cabinets if applicable.

Now, how do we fulfill the dream? The options are: do it yourself, hire a carpenter or go to a specialist fitted bedroom supplier.

The DIY option can involve buying flat pack bedroom furniture from a major chain such as Ikea B & Q or Homebase, buying timber and raw materials from a timber merchant or seeking out a specialist bespoke furniture maker who is willing to sell you the wardrobes and cabinets on a supply only basis for you to install.

In truth, the installation cost of fitted furniture is usually only about 15% of the total price and the saving is marginal and likely to be lost completely in the event of damage during fitting or a mismeasure, both of which are costs that the professional installer would have to cover. Further, a self installation will probably annul the makers guarantee which should be for a minimum of five, and possibly ten years.

The only serious way to make serious savings as a DIY project is to buy cheaper quality, mass produced and standard sized units from a ’shed’ or to make the whole thing from scratch.

Making it all yourself can be an exciting challenge but you will need good carpentry skills, professional quality tools, including, at a minimum, a power screwdriver, a jigsaw, and a good range of hand tools.

You will also need plenty of time (an average DIY fitted bedroom project would take a minimum of two days using flat pack units and probably  ten days or more if you are making it all from raw materials), possibly spread over several weekends if you need to fit it around the day job. What else you may need is understanding neighbours and a very tolerant partner.

Next week, I will look at what materials to work with and how to set about the construction of your dream fitted bedroom.