This is a topic on which I have touched before but it is one that continues to crop up when talking to clients about fitted bedrooms, so I thought it might be helpful to go into more detail.

I am often told that clients have experienced problems on opening fitted wardrobe doors, and particularly when picking out seasonal clothes such as ski wear or last year’s summer clothes that have been in the cupboard for perhaps 6 to 11 months since their last wearing, and finding that the clothes have mould stains that can be difficult, or even impossible, to clean.

It is often assumed that this is the result of penetrating or rising damp, and it might be where the bedroom is on the ground floor or the property is pre 1930s and does not have a cavity wall.  However, with the majority of bedrooms being at first floor level or higher and most houses, going back to the 19th century, being of cavity wall construction, the cause probably lies elsewhere.

If any part of a fitted wardrobe, even one end, is on an external wall or a chimney breast the internal surface of that wall is likely to be colder than the ambient temperature in the room, particularly in a centrally heated house in winter.

The warm air in our houses absorbs moisture from our persperation, exhalation and cooking.  We open a wardrobe door, perhaps only once in the morning and once in the evening and moist warm air displaces the still, drier, cooler air within. We go off to work or go to bed and as the outside surfaces of our home cool, heat is drawn outwards from the inner walls, cooling the surfaces and the air trapped within the furniture which gives up its humidity and precipitates some moisture onto the inner surfaces of the wardrobe and onto the clothes stored there. The next time we open the cupboard doors the interior warms up and we have created the perfect moist, dark environment for a small mushroom farm.

The solution? If you are getting quotations for bespoke fitted bedroom furniture from companies like Options Fitted Furniture insist that the wardrobes are fully carcassed, that is; completely sealed, with solid (ideally 18mm) backs to the carcasses and that there is still air space of at least 30mm between the backs and the walls.  It may cost a little more than what is usually refered to as front-frame bedroom furniture but it will smell a whole lot nicer and your precious clothes will be safe.

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.

It is always good to be asked to make some new furniture for an old customer and to get the opportunity to see how a bespoke piece of fitted furniture I designed a few years ago is looking.

However it’s a real treat when the last installation was 16 years ago.

Styles have moved on since then but it was good to see that this faux limed oak fitted wall unit looked as good as on the day it was installed.

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!

How do you finish off a run of fitted wardrobes?

Sometimes a slab ended wardrobe can be an unattractive option, particularly near to a doorway.

There are a limited number of options available, they break down into: open ended display shelves, an angled cupboard with open display above or a wardrobe with an angled doors.

The attached photos and sketch will give you some idea but I would love to hear of an alternative suggestions.

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.

A frequently asked question about fitted wardrobes is whether they should have backs on them or whether they should just be front frames with the walls and ceiling forming the interior.

If the wardrobes are entirely on internal walls then there may be a case for not having backs if you are desperate for every cubic inch of storage or because the room is so narrow that you need to restrict the wardrobe depth to 550 mm.  The cost saving is marginal and you will not get the feel of a proper piece of fitted furniture whenever you open the doors.

However, if even one end of the wardrobes is on an external wall think very carefully about the condensation risk. On a winter morning you open your wardrobe doors and let in a flow of centrally heated air that comes into contact with the cool external wall, you close the doors and trap that warm, moist air inside the wardrobe and it spends the next ten hours cooling and precipitating its moisture content onto the walls.  Much later you open your wardrobe again and let in another batch of warm air to repeat the process through the night.  Don’t be surprised if your clothes start to smell of damp and begin to grow a patina of black mould.

Fitted wardrobes on external walls must have backs on them and a free air space between the backs and the walls.  Ideally, the back should be of 18mm thick laminated chipboard or MDF.  Otherwise, what you saved by cutting corners on the wardrobes will be spent on dry cleaning or replacing your precious clothes.

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!