In earlier posts about buying bespoke furniture we have looked at what you gain from using the professionals rather than the less expensive carpenter and considered the benefits of using somebody with the knowledge and experience to design a bedroom, home study or home cinema furniture. We also considered the differences in the look and feel of furniture made in factory conditions and then delivered and installed, rather than constructed on-site with your home doubling as the cabinet maker’s workshop.

The next benefit to consider is being able to see examples of the finished product before you buy. Generally speaking, it is unusual for a carpenter to have a showroom, whereas it is highly unusual for a fitted furniture specialist not to have displays of installations that you can see and feel. You would not buy a second hand car unseen, or for that matter a carpet, a bathroom suite or a kitchen appliance but it never ceases to amaze me that people can ask a tradesman to build them fitted wardrobes or alcove units costing hundreds, and probably thousands of pounds, from a sketch and possibly a small sample of material.

A fitted furniture designer will usually come to an appointment with a boot full of samples in his car, but if you are dealing with a legitimate bespoke furniture company you would expect a proper showroom on the high street, a trading estate or, in the case of an independent specialist, attached to the factory or workshop.

Visiting a showroom allows you to get a feel of, not only, how the manufacturer makes its product but also the pride in the quality it offers. It helps you imagine how the product will look in your own home and, very importantly provides a benchmark with which to judge your finished installation and ensure that ‘what you see is what you get’. Metaphorically ‘kicking the tyres’ helps avoid disappointment in your purchase and should allow you to make upgrades or stipulations about how well the drawers run, the level of gloss on a lacquered finish or the exact shade of oak or walnut you expect.

Now we have three reasons for going to the professionals: Design Service, Product Quality and See Before You Buy. But that is not it, by any means. In the coming weeks I intend to give you many more reasons why the professionals are best.

OK, so whilst considering whether to use an established professional bespoke fitted furniture supplier or to save money by employing a carpenter I have cited the benefits of dealing with somebody who can supply a design service and produce technical drawings that make it clear what exactly to expect from the finished product.

The second benefit that I would to look at is the nature of the finished product: Apart from the initial design aspect and a clear understanding of your expectations, the  fitted furniture or cabinet maker will have a factory or workshop in which bench joiners (a different trade to carpentry) will prepare the doors and carcasses to precise sizes, usually within a millimetre,  and finish them ready for delivery to site and installation. The bench joinery is the messy part with wood shavings and dust that has to be extracted mechanically from the atmosphere in order to avoid health hazards. It isn’t just modern materials like mdf that carry risks, the dust from traditional hardwoods can be carcinogenic. By the time that factory made fitted furniture reaches your home it should be clean and sealed from the air.

A carpenter will normally purchase the raw materials, bring them to your house and do all the cutting,  drilling and finishing on-site. This has three effects: (1) the disruption is greater and takes much longer, perhaps a week to make a set of wardrobes as opposed to a day or two to install factory made units. (2) There will be more pollution to the atmosphere in your home, wood dust can take weeks to settle and the varnish or paint used in finishing your new furniture will be emitting solvents and adours for some time. Current legislation bans the use of air-dried finishes in factories and the new catlyst dried lacquers are virtually inert by the time they reach your home. (3) The painted or varnished finishes that can be applied by brush after the furniture is made are far less durable and abrasion resistant than sprayed on factory finishes.

Of course, you may prefer a more hand-made look to your furniture and prefer that it looks like something a carpenter has made, and at Options Fitted Furniture we do, from time to time, use various techniques to produce distressed or brush painted finishes that look hand-made whilst still retaining the hard wearing properties of modern materials.

So there you have it, the advantages of a skilled furniture designer backed up by a drawing office and a clear understanding of what you will get when it is finished  and the reduced disruption in your home coupled with the nature of the finished product are two powerful arguments for calling in the professionals.

However there is more to come and in future posts I will be looking at seeing before you buy and the project management aspects of having a new fitted bedroom, home study or living room furniture installed.

A very good question and one I was asked by a prospective new customer recently.

I had to ad lib my answer but I can’t have done too bad a job because that client has now placed a very nice order for fitted bedroom furniture.

What other choices did she have? Well, I know for a fact that she had had quotations from other fitted furniture companies and from a local carpenter. I had nothing to fear from my other mainstream competitors because, although they all claim to make bespoke furniture, I am certain that none of them have the flexibility to achieve what this client wanted. The carpenter, however was another issue.

I have no wish to disparage carpenters, and those that don’t work for us as part of the Options Furniture installation team have every right to earn a living and do, on the whole, provide a very valuable service.

However, there is one reason why my prospective client would consider using a carpenter and it is a powerful one – price! There is no reason why a carpenter, with minimal overhead, cannot make and install fitted wardrobes for considerable less money than we can.

So, why should this customer choose Options Furniture or any other professional fitted bedroom supplier rather than a carpenter?

1. The design aspect: This client has a very attractive but difficult to furnish loft conversion and really needed professional help to design a bedroom while resolving complex issues about retaining the elegant proportions of the room and providing adequate storage solutions in difficult spaces. Furthermore, she was looking for the Japanese look and I have my reservations about whether a carpenter would have the skills and experience to address these issues.The Japanese look is often achieved with sliding doors that mimic the screens that divide up traditional Japanese houses but can be interpreted in other ways.
   In the event, I was able to offer five designs that resolved the complexity of the awkward spaces, creating the Tardis effect and achieving a Japanese look in a variety of ways.

   

   Whatever his skills, it is rare to find a carpenter who can resolve storage and space problems and present those design solutions through technical drawings that the customer can interpret such that they can make the right choice and have a clear understanding of what they are going to recieve.

2. There are many other benefits of using a professional bespoke fitted furniture supplier rather than a carpenter and I will address some more of these in my next post.