Whether you are in the market for a loft conversion, a conservatory, fitted home office furniture, a new fitted kitchen, double glazing or fitted wardrobes it is good practice to get three competitive quotations.

possibly from one of the major companies like Hammonds,  Neville Johnson, Everest or Moben who advertise regularly in the glossy home interest magazinesor the weekend colour supplements but do look out for the ubiquitous ‘half price sale’.  These are rarely what they claim to be; Sharps bedrooms are always offered at some variation on 50% off.  Nobody ever pays the ‘full price’ for a Moben kitchen and even the interest on Sharps’ ‘interest free’ credit on fitted study furniture is paid for out of the profit on your order. Take these fake discounts with a pinch of salt.

You may wish to include a local carpenter in your quotations list. He or she will probably be cheaper than one of the major high street, home improvement companies, but do be certain to ask for references or testamonials from previous clients and try to visit and see a real furniture installation in your local area.  Otherwise you could be buying a pig-in-a-poke rather than the luxury fitted bedroom that you have been dreaming about.  Also bear in mind that a carpenter will probably do a lot of the manufacturing under your roof and be in te house for a lot longer.  Also, the local carpenter may not be able to produce a factory finish on wardrobe doors or if he buys in pre-finished doors or wardrobe carcasses he may be limited to standard sizes and not be able to produce a proper bespoke installation. Further the carpenter is unlikely to have a showroom where you can examine the product prior to purchase.

The third way is to talk to a smaller, regional fitted furniture manufacturer or double glazing supplier covering a smaller geographic are, maybe just one or two counties such as Surrey and Sussex or the whole of London and the South East. Independent fitted furniture companies such as Options are likely to to have just one or two showrooms rather than an expensive High Street presence that the retail customer always ends up paying for.  Smaller, family run bespoke cabinet makers are usual much more flexible than the bigger players and will be more willing to produce a tailor-made design to fit the dimensions of your home and achieve a better fit and cupboards that maximise the match between the space available and your storage requirements.

Take the opportunity to look at as many offerings for home improvements online as you can, choose three companies to quote, preferably one from each market sector, and take all the time you need to choose the one that is right for you and most likely make exactly what you want at a price you can afford.

It is over 10 years since I last had a ‘proper job’; you know, one where you get up at the same time everyday, travel from home to a place of work, finish at a given time and return to private life in the evening.

10 years ago, I took a break from a lifetime of working in the furniture industry to provide marketing services to house-builders, you must remember them. I fitted myself out with a home office in the loft and spent most of my time mailing and telephoning small companies to offer an ‘out-sourced marketing department’, with reasonable success, particularly with the aforesaid house-builders.

About five years ago I was asked by Options Furniture to take on the role of marketing manager, on a consultancy basis, and as the house-builder market has faded away, most of my time is now spent marketing bespoke fitted furniture from my home office.

So, how do you adjust to a life where you do not have to have a rigid daily timetable and no longer need to commute to the office, which is 30 seconds from my bedroom?

With the growth in home working, I now have several friends who run ‘cottage’ based businesses. One, a life coach, rises at 0.700, has breakfast, sees the kids off to school and college and then ‘walks to work’; round the block and back into his own front door.  I am not sure whether or not he walks home in the evening. We also hold a ‘virtual office Christmas party’ every year at a local restaurant from which our friends with proper jobs are excluded.

Two others, a wine importer and a surveyor meet regularly over coffee at a local café for some ‘water-cooler’ chat. One of them takes an afternoon power nap and that is one privilege of home working that I relish.

Me? I make sure that I have some time structured morning activities like breakfast Rotary and BNI to keep me in the habit of getting up and to provide some fellowship and camaraderie. I meet up with a bunch of guys at a different pub once every month for some proper man time and I do some volunteering for charity.

Otherwise, my working day is a bit solitary but compensated for by a comfortable working environment provided by beautiful, bespoke fitted home office furniture bought from Options Fitted Furniture.   Yes, I do get a discount!

Does anybody have other strategies?
Jun 09

Of course the market for fitted wardrobes and home office furniture is a bit flat right now.  A lot of the market for bespoke fitted furniture is housing related and with the sharp downturn in property sales all furniture retailers are seeing reduced demand.  That fact added to flat retail spending on big ticket items generally isn’t helping.

However, we have seen some interesting activity at the top end of the market with an order to furnish a grand 16th century manor house that is 20 times our average order vale; 20 fitted bedrooms on one day would be a sizeable contribution to our monthly turnover at any time but doubly welcome in the current market.

We have also ventured into some new market areas for bespoke cabinetry that are not just domestic clients and although commercial fit outs may be a fewer than in the boom years, another single order has proved almost equal to a month’s sales in retail fitted furniture.

Now I really have heard it all.

Following my recent post about solid wood doors, I am told by a client that what was being sold as ’solid wood’ was in fact wood veneer. However, the latest feedback suggests a well known fitted furniture company is offering ‘Man Made Wood’!

There are man made wood substitutes like mdf, and many man made wood effect surfaces like foil, vinyl and melamines but man made wood? This may just be an aberation by an over enthusiastic, or desperate, salesman and I will wait to see the formal announcement of this amazing technological breakthrough.

In the meantime, I would welcome the view of a Trading Standards Officer and urge anybody looking for real wood fitted furniture to treat such claims with scepiticism.

It crops up now and again that we are asked to make furniture with solid wood doors.

Why not?  Well, firstly what do we mean by solid wood doors? Our Kingston, five piece and seven piece doors are made from pieces of solid wood  (see Study/Office – CEO’s Office) in the way that cabinet makers and joiners have been making wooden doors for centuries.  They are expensive but they work.

What some people are looking for are flat solid wood doors (see Study/Office – Oak and Walnut) and yes, as you can see, we can and occassionaly do, make flat, solid wood doors at a client’s request.

However, experience has shown us that the craftsmen of old knew what they were doing when they developed the five piece door. Because the five piece construction allows for a degree of independent movement between the component parts and because the grain in the various components runs in different directions, the design has a balancing effect that minimises, but does not totally eliminate the tendency of timbers to split or warp as they adapt to the specific and changing humidity in a particular house. Due, of course to changing climatic conditions and artificial influences such as central heating.

Flat solid wood doors simply do not work in the same way as five piece doors and we know, to our cost, that they are troublesome.  In the instance of the Oak and Walnut study cited above, there has been some splitting but, fortunately, no warping and the client understands that this is the price of insisting on solid wood flat doors.

It is also interesting to note that the great cabinet makers of old, like Chippendale and Sherrington and laterley McIntosh did not make doors from solid wood.  In fact, they were very sparing in their use of exotic and expensive timbers that had been hauled halfway around the world.  They would make legs and frameworks and table tops from solid indigenous woods, such as beech and elm and oak but when it came to doors they would make them in the five piece method or use blockboard, probably prepared by their apprentices, from locally grown hardwoods, in which the blocks were brought together with their grains in opposing directions to balance the strains, and then veneer them with thin layers of decorative woods such as walnut or mahogany.

Today, we do not use blockboard to a great extent because particle boards and mdf are now available in superior qualities, that are not only less expensive, but also much more stable than any other timber based substrate. Bear in mind that particle board and mdf are timber based but totally free of grain with its wayward tendency. Chippendale would have used mdf if it had been available.

We also run a small trade  side to our furniture manufacturing business, that supplies kitchen studios with bespoke doors in sizes and designs that are not generally available from major kitchen manufacturers. Here we make a lot of five piece real wood doors in oak, cherry, walnut, maple and other exotic timbers, and very succesfully.  However, we have been asked, and occasionally have made solid, flat hardwood doors and frankly they are a nightmare.

So what is our policy on solid hardwood, flat doors?  If you insist, we will use them for modest sized doors in, say, a study or wall unit on the understanding that you accept some movement, but on wardrobes? NO WAY.

I personally have nearly 50 years experience in the furniture trade and Options have over 25 and we say, unequivocally, don’t go there. Flat, wood veneered doors look great and are very modern (see Fitted Bedrooms – Stunning Zebrano), but take a tip from me and Mr Chippendale; insist on them being veneered!

Research shows that the word cheap is one of the most highly used online search criteria. So, one must assume that a lot of people looking for bespoke fitted furniture, whether for bedrooms, home studies or living rooms will be searching for ‘cheap fitted furniture’, particularly in these credit crunch sensitive times.Where will that take them and what really is cheap fitted furniture?

Everybody should be looking for value for money when investing in home improvements like fitted wardrobes or a home study but the lowest price will not always be the cheapest.  The lowest price will invariably involve some degree of compromise, such as using standard size rather than bespoke units and thereby sacrificing storage space and may well limit the degree of choice in colours and finishes.

However buying what appears to be the cheapest fitted wardrobes or home entertainment furniture unit may incur unforseen costs.  Does the price include an expert design and planning service to ensure not only that it fits properly but that it performs all the functions required and doesn’t restrict access to important services or limit the space available for the bed or the plasma screen TV?  Does the design allow for discrete wiring or plumbing?

But most importantly, does cheap furniture come with a 10 year insurance backed guarantee to ensure that you get a minimum decade of service from it?

Other hidden costs might include the replacement of clothing damaged by mould growth if bedroom furniture is not fitted with backs ( see previous post) or the cost of replacing it in a new home if and when you move ( see Who says you can’t take it with you?).

And, if you do move and the property market is still flat, will your bespoke fitted furniture be the ‘cherry on the top’ that creates the level of interest that allows you to hold out for the asking price? Cheap looking fitted furniture units that a prospective buyer knows they will want to replace as soon as they move in could cost you thousands of pounds in a tough property negotiation.

Cheap is not always the cheapest in the long run and may mean that by spending less than you should in the short term your pleasure in the purchase is reduced, you may spend more over time by replacing it sooner and when you finally move away from your current home you might take less money with you.

Options installed a fitted office/study about three years ago for a Mr.W who works from home. He was delighted but, due to a growing family, decided to move house.

The study should have been an asset to the new owners but they needed the ground floor room as a bedroom for an elderly parent. The new owner sought our advice regarding removal of the study furniture and at the same time Mr. W asked us to quote for a fitted study in his new house. We suggested that we uplift the old furniture and design a new installation, partly from the old but incorporating a new bespoke dresser/radiator cover and a wardrobe for his motor cycle gear, neatly solving the problem for the new owner at the same time.

Mr. W’s new study cost less than half what it would have cost had we not recycled the old furniture. We could have sold Mr. W an all new study and doubled our order value but by taking the course we did, we achieved a very satisfied customer who has now ordered two sets of fitted wardrobes for the bedrooms in the new house.

Everyone’s a winner: the new house owner had the furniture removed for free, Mr.W saved around £2k on his new study, Options have a very satisfied customer and a new bedroom furniture order and the environment gets the benefit of some major recycling!

Just returned from a break and the first task is to produce a new ad for a life-style magazine.

A quick conference establishes that we will go with lots of images of fitted furniture to establish the fantastic breadth of the range, three shots of bedroom wardrobes (including sliding doors), two study/offices and a home cinema wall unit, roughly proportionate to our sales mix. Include a flash about our current “buy now, pay later” promotion and a few testimonials.

What about testimonials? Do they work? Do people believe them? Snake-oil salesmen always had a long list of “unsolicited testimonials”; can this make us look like a snake-oil salesman?

We do have hundreds, possibly thousands, of testimonials if you include the comments on our customer satisfaction questionnaires (are they by definition ’solicited’ rather than unsolicited?).  The vast majority are positive, the runaway favourite multiple choice questions are “Very Good” and “Excellent”, but it’s the “Any Other Comments” section that produces the real glow.

Yes, we do get some negative response (any company that tells you that they never have a dissatisfied client is telling porkies) and no, we don’t use those in our advertising.  However, as they happy customers outnumber the less than contented ones by about 100 to 1, we would need to show over a hundred testimonials to include one negative one in fair proportion.

We are certainly more honest than theatre and cinema promoters who often take the one or two positive words in a generally bad review and plaster them all over the bill boards.

All  the mix of testimonials, unsolicited letters and customer satisfaction questionnaires, unedited, are available in our offices for viewing.  And, I will include four or five of the best in my advert.  Will prospective customers comparing us with our competitors, like Hammonds and Neville Johnson, believe them? We all sell basically the same product, fitted furniture, and although we believe that ours is the only product that is truly bespoke; how is the client to judge who is likely to give them the highest level of satisfaction?

We all use testimonials and none of us cries “stinking fish” but how can I establish that our feedback is more reliable than others’? I guess that an invitation for anybody to come and see the originals is the only option.  Will any other fitted furniture manufacturer do the same?

At Options fitted furniture we  give a 10 year, insurance backed guarantee.

What’s that worth to the client? Obviously, the peace of mind that comes from knowing that the fitted bedroom or home study they have just invested in is good for a minimum of 10 years service; but you’d expect any reputable company to look after your furniture for a decent period after installation without the need for a written guarantee or an insurance policy, wouldn’t you?

Yes, you would expect that but it means more when your wardrobe or home cinema installer has the confidence to put his money where his mouth is and demonstrate his belief in the products longevity.  Can you imagine the nightmare of having to keep doing remedial work to the thousands of installations over a ten year period if the quality was at all suspect. Suppliers of shoddy goods do not give long guarantees.

In truth, very little does go wrong with built-in furniture if its well made and properly installed and the recalls under guarantee are few and far between.  However, when it is necessary to fix something many years later the brownie points available are unmeasurable.

I was recently called back to quote for replacing the doors on a sliding door wardrobe that we had installed 21 years ago and to supply a range of bespoke drawer units and a home entertainment area, not because it had worn out but simply ‘because it is looking dated’.  Of course, the client could have gone to Hammonds, Neville Johnson or any of our competitors but they came back to us. Why? Because one of the old wardrobe’s sliding door mechanisms had developed a fault 15 years after installation and well outside the 10 year guarantee.

What did we do? We repaired it free of charge, not because we had to but because it was the decent thing to do.

The cost to Options? Maybe £100 materials and labour. What’s a guarantee worth? When it brings an old customer back 21 years later – priceless!

Well, we finally took delivery of our new fitted furniture delivery van, decorated with a selection of fitted bedrooms, sliding door wardrobes, wall units and home offices it really looks the business. Its like seeing the Options showroom driving around.

It just had to be the dullest, greyest un-June like day when it arrived so the photos aren’t brilliant. I will try to take some more pictures but as it’s working flat out from 8 a.m. to night fall delivering the finest bespoke fitted furniture to lots of happy customers throughout London and the south east I might have difficulty catching up with it.

One thing’s for sure, Paul the driver has nowhere to hide; he is very high profile from now on.