A very common question I get asked is:  ’should our wardrobe doors be hinged or sliding?’

Obviously, there is no ‘one size fits all’ answer, and we offer a bespoke fitted wardrobe service to cover all client needs, however here are some factors to bear in mind and some common myths and misunderstandings:

‘Sliding doors on wardrobes will be cheaper’

Not necessarily. Very cheap sliding wardrobe doors are available from the DIY sheds but the top quality, and reliable, sliding door mechanisms used by bespoke fitted furniture makers are not especially cheap. Also the range of prices is much narrower. At Options Fitted Furniture we have a broad range of finishes on hinged doors which means that the starting price is lower than for sliders but the top end price can be double that.

‘Sliding door wardrobes  save space’

This is a widely stated hypothesis but it is not easily proven.

Firstly, because sliding door wardrobes usually have a double track so that one door passes in front of another with a gap between them, the space taken up by the doors is about 40 mm more than for a hinged door system. Added to this is the factor that hinged doors tend to push the sleeves of garments back into the wardrobe, whereas those sleeves can get caught between two sliding doors or trapped between the door edge and the framework at the ends of a sliding door wardrobe. Therefore, an ideal sliding door installation will be at least 50 mm (two inches) deeper than a hinged door one.

Secondly, In an ideal situation you will allow at least 450 mm (18 inches) of standing space in front of any wardrobe and provided you specify doors that are around 400 mm wide (400 mm or 16 inches is an industry standard for the smallest wardrobe door, although a bespoke fitted bedroom furniture manufacturer will make even smaller doors). In an extremely small room, it might be necessary for the wardrobe to extend almost up to the bed, such that it is only possible to access the wardrobe whilst standing or kneeling on the bed. In this case a sliding door is the only option.

Fitted Wardrobes, where it all started

Back in the early 1980’s, I took my first tentative steps into the fitted furniture business or, more accurately, the fitted bedroom market. My first company was called Berkshire Bedrooms, with a focus on fitted wardrobes and fairly soon I teamed up with a business partner and launched Wispaglide Wardrobes. Silly name but indicative of our focus on sliding door wardrobes.

We soon added a range of bi-folding wardrobe doors to the mix and spent several years making and installing just fitted wardrobes before morphing into Options Furniture, taking on a graduate furniture designer (he’s still with us and is now the managing director) and developing the most comprehensive range of bespoke fitted furniture for bedrooms, living rooms, home cinemas, home studies and home offices in the UK.

But still in spite of our current diversity and experience in the domestic and commercial sectors with fitting out projects and reception desks, wardrobes still account for over 50% of our production and deep down, they are in our corporate blood.

We still do sliding doors and bi-fold doors, although the systems we use now have developed by leaps and bounds and offer unrivalled levels of durability (to which we now attach a 10 year guarantee) but the vast majority of the wardrobes we make are now of the hinged door type. Even these have literally thousands of permutations with doors up to 2.6 metres high and full height or doors split into two or more sections.

Our wardrobe doors are made from mdf, lacquered in a choice of thousands of colours and finishes ranging from matt through satin to high gloss or wrapped in vinyl or foil wood effects, or laminates in dozens of faux wood effects. Or, alternatively, from almost any hardwood, either solid or veneered.

We have come a long way but basically we are fitted wardrobe people at heart.

Fitted Wardrobes – where it all started.

The lounge, the sitting room, the parlour, the family room, the tv room, reception room; all names for the room in the house where we entertain guests or gather together to chat, read or watch TV. some people might be lucky enough to have seperate rooms for all of the above and would not therefore require a name specifically for the room they live in but for most people a living room is the minimum requirement, perhaps augmented by a dining room.

Growing up in the 1950s it was always the living room in our house and I had thought the term had probably gone out of fashion in favour of specific appellations like home cinema  or AV room. I was therefore surprised on checking the Options Furniture website statistics to discover that, along with kid’s rooms and children’s bedrooms, living room furniture and variations thereon was the most popular search term in August.

Certainly, we have seen a rise in enquiries and orders for bespoke fitted living room furniture this year. What is interesting is the broad variety of types of fitted furniture we are making for living rooms, ranging from ornate classical designs, through Arts and Crafts to austere, minimalist installations:

the range of specific component parts, such as drinks cabinets (used to be called cocktail cabinets), crockery cupboards, cutlery drawers, Hi Fi cabinets and housings for Sky boxes, free-view boxes and recorders, and the range of names that people give to this emerging market trend: Home-Cinemas, TV wall units, AV or Audio Visual cabinets, dressers.

The strengths of a truly bespoke furniture maker really come into play in this diverse and nascent market.  Fitted bedroom furniture is still the larger market but it only has a handful of basic component parts.  Of course there are endless permutations and many ranges of design and finish but 90% of the spend goes on wardrobes, chests of drawers and cabinets in one form or another and, up to a point, suppliers can, and do, get away with using standard size components and describing the product as bespoke or custom-made.

However, and in my experience, most fitted living room units are one-off designs resulting from a collaboration between the customer and the designer to produce a product that is truly unique.

Your living room should be anything you wish it to be and so should the furniture.

Like most home improvement businesses, the fitted furniture industry is subject to trends and fashions. The difficult trick for bespoke furniture manufacturers is spotting the trend and staying ahead of the curve.

Unlike the clothing inside your fitted wardrobes, the cabinetry is expected to last for decades and should come with a ten-year guarantee at the very least. The problem for the consumer is finding a range of bedroom or living room furniture that pleases today’s aeshetic but will not look dated in five years time.

What is ‘classic’, ‘traditional’, ‘modern’ or ‘contemporary’ is a subjective choice and whatever style you choose for your built-in furniture has to please you now without the propensity to look dated the next time you redecorate.

In my view, an excellent choice is plain, flat, minimalist doors in, high-gloss finish. This is a very modern look but does not offend in an older style house and has the added benefit of making rooms look bigger, is low maintainence and does not tie you into any particular style of decoration; use it with plain walls to create an open spacious effect or try it with a bold patterned wallpaper for dramatic impact.

High-gloss works well in fitted bedrooms, living rooms and on audio visual units and can be used to create a stunning contemporary home office.

High-gloss fitted furniture has been around for over decades so it looks as if it is here to stay, is not just a fashion trend and will, no doubt, still look up to date when the guarantee has long expired.

The earliest examples of high-gloss furniture were pioneered by a company called Meredew back in the 1960s and used a tough polyester finish over both light and dark wood veneers. The finish was applied using a ‘curtain-coating method in which the doors and panels were passed through a ‘waterfall’ or ‘curtain’ that poured the polyester lacquer in a technologically controlled stream that was so even that you could hardly see it moving. The whole process required a dust-free, environment and was very expensive to maintain. This process was only economical for mass production runs and did not lend itself to bespoke manufacture.

later developments in automotive finishes, using acid-caltalysed, hand sprayed lacquers have transfered into furniture manufacture and allow much greater flexibility in small batch production. It is now possible to offer a virtually unlimited range of colours and apply high-gloss to both plain mdf and wood veneers. The gloss is obtained by hand-polishing with ‘cutting pastes’, again a motor industry development.

Other types of high-gloss finish such as solid acrylics are available but are often prohibitively expensive and not as hard or scratch resistant.

At Options Furniture we have achieved some stunning high-gloss effects by spraying lacquer onto the back of glass before fixing it to the furniture; this offers the same wide choice of colours with high durability but is still expensive.

There are also some vinyl-wrapped high-gloss finishes around but the nature of vynils renders them soft and easily scratched or damaged. Also, the vinyl finish tends to dull down in a very short time and the  look is very plastic.

The latest breakthrough in high-gloss finishes has now arrived and looks very exciting; high gloss laminates. Early attempts at using high-gloss laminate on chipboard substrates were not very successful because the inherently course surface of particle board showed through the surface of the quite thin laminates. However, the second generation of  high-gloss laminates, in both wood effects and solid colours, on mdf are setting a new standard in finish quality, is tough enough for a fitted home office or study and seems set to establish the fitted furniture look for this decade.

Ask your bespoke fitted furniture designer about the new possibilities in high-gloss laminated fitted furniture.