Most customers of the fitted furniture market have a room(s) and a storage requirement(s) coupled with an aeshetic preference and a budget. The job of the fitted furniture designer is to examine the first two issues and produce a design that a adresses the need within the constraints of the latter two.

Occassionaly, the client will have produced the design themselves and simply require that the supplier produces and installs the furniture from the customers choice of materials and within the budget. This sounds simple, but where does the consumer go to find this service?

In the first instance, they need a supplier with the necessary craft skills (carpenter, joiner or cabinet maker)  together with the ability to source the materials and a workshop or production facility to convert those materials into finished products.  The supplier will also need the communication skills to understand the client’s expectations and the drafting expertise and understanding of construction methods that will allow them to convert the aspiration into detailed working drawings to be fed back to the client such as to assure them that the finished product will be what they thought first thought of . Sounds simple, but it aint!

A lifetime in the furniture market, both bespoke and custom-made and observing how often the process can fail, convinces me of the essential need for great care on the consumer’s part when embarking on this path. Firstly, the necessary combination of craft, communication and drafting skills will rarely be found in one person. I can think of a few highly skilled master cabinet makers  who are multi-skilled enough to pull it off but these are highly skilled individuals whose services do not come cheap. Also such super stars of the fitted furniture market can be prima donnas who may find it difficult to subjugate their own design skills to those of their clients who have strong ideas of their own.  If you have a big budget and are willing to place your precious concept in the hands of a master like Mark Wilkinson or John Makepiece you will not be disappointed.

For most people, with more modest budgets, the road is set with pitfalls. Try the major fitted furniture companies like Hammonds or Sharps but expect to be told that ‘this is what we do and we will be pleased to fit our products to your needs and aspirations’. Be prepared to compromise. You could employ a carpenter but insist on precise documentation that guarantees you will get exactly what you wished for or that will empower you to reach a satisfactory conclusion in the event that you don’t. Also, with the carpenter, establish whether he/she has access to a remote production facility that allows your furniture to be manufactured and finished off-site or expect to entertain your tradesman in your home for days or weeks and to live with the disruption and the smell of glues and varnishes for some time after they leave.

There is another route: find a small to medium sized bespoke fitted furniture manufacturer that employs skilled and trained designers with the required communication skills, a draftsman (man or woman), a qualified cabinet maker who knows how to turn a design into a set of manufacturing instructions, a production facility with skilled bench joiners and the capacity to custom-make and finish  individual pieces of furniture that will fit together to form a perfectly fitted installation in your home, and carpenter installers selected for their craft skills and demeanor that will make the short period in your home (usually one or two days per room) a pleasurable experience.

Here are a few furniture installations designed by client’s and interpreted, manufactured and installed by Options Fitted Furniture.