Ok, what are the dangers in this mindset? Well, I think that analogous to other home renovations (not as involved or fixed), installing fitted wardrobes should be treated as an investment to your home. Ideally, you would want to add value to your home. This is of course looking at the situation from a financial point of view. If you choose to sell you home some time in the future, you obviously want the most you can get for it. Just note that this advice isn’t simply limited to wardrobes.

So say if you bought cheap fitted wardrobes and when installed, they do in fact look cheap. This would not reflect well on the house value. A possible scenario might be that the potential buyer would think to themselves – “Gee, the house is great, but that wardrobe needs to go. It’s going to cost X dollars for me to remove, so I’m going knock that much off my offer price, otherwise it’s just not worth for me to buy”.

Another point is that if you manage to find a manufacturer who will be willing to build and install your fitted wardrobe cheaply, are they compromising on something? For example, are they using inferior quality material? Where are they sourcing their stuff from? If the end product sitting in your bedroom is poor, you can expect that it won’t last long and before you know it, you’ll need to replace it which is going to cost more money.

Is the manufacturer cutting cost some other ways? Maybe they are using off-the-shelf or merely modified standard products, which means what you get is not truly a fully customized fitted wardrobe. Or possibly, they won’t offer designing from an expert and that is left up to you alone without help. Are you going to be compromising on customer service? Will they factor into their build, components to prevent growth of moulds inside the wardrobe (and hence on your clothes).

Finally, what about guarantees or more importantly, insurance backed guarantee? If they secretly know that what you buy from them won’t last more than 6 years, they might only guarantee the wardrobe for 5 years. If the company closes its operations, will they still be contractually obligated to make repairs on the wardrobe you bought from them?

So to close off, be wary of what may look like saving money now but may become costly down the road. You should think of the long run.

There exist big sized companies in the furniture industry that claim to produce bespoke fitted wardrobes when in fact, after a bit of further probing, they actually use standard type components almost extensively. They might only have available a small range of sizes in their products or at best, they might modify the standard components to retro-fit for your usage. This cannot compare to fitted wardrobes that are completely customized.

How customized can a bespoke fitted wardrobe be? This depends on the manufacturer. If they are really the best of best in their line of work, you can literally have an infinite number of possibilities that’s only really limited by your imagination. Of course this is subject to the physical constraints of your room. Here is a sample list of what is possible:

• Size – wall-to-wall, continue around corners, angled.

• Handles

• Doors – choose either hinged or sliding. Other than personal taste, this would also depend on size of your room. If efficient use of space is top priority, then you would go for a fitted sliding wardrobe. With the hinged, you can choose either ‘lay-on’ or ‘in-frame’. The former is more modern with the hinges hidden from sight on the outside whilst the latter is more traditional with the butt hinges showing.

Storage components and arrangement – different combinations of hanging rails, drawers, tie racks, shoe racks, adjustable or fixed shelves, even rotating shelves. The storage options are very flexible here.

Styling & Finish – you can choose either traditional looking, contemporary fitted wardrobes, or design anything in between. For example, a traditional style might be with a natural wood finish or with painted wood; and a contemporary style wardrobe might be a fitted sliding wardrobe with tinted mirror panels. You can make your fitted wardrobe stand out in your bedroom or completely blend in almost seamlessly.

It is quite apparent that bespoke fitted wardrobes are in no doubt more costly than your run-of-the-mill wardrobes, so why on earth would someone pay for such a thing? Three big reasons – space, flexibility, appearance. Yes, it is preferable that you have a large room to start off with, but with a completely customized wardrobe, you can better utilize the space that you have. For example, if you have a sloping ceiling or an alcove area, then getting someone to tailor make a wardrobe for such awkward spaces would allow you to better use an otherwise vacant and wasted spots. The flexibility in the storage options you can have offered by a bespoke fitted wardrobe speaks for itself. Lastly, you may not be able to find a standard wardrobe that matches well with your bedroom. With a fully-tailored wardrobe, you significantly reduce this issue.

Attic Fitted Wardrobe