Fitted bedrooms are one of the more demanding jobs we do in Abingdon precisely because the town's housing is so mixed. In the Georgian and timber-framed houses around East St Helen Street and the Market Place, principal bedrooms often have low ceilings on the upper floor, sloped sections under the roofline and box rooms too small for a standard double wardrobe carcass, so every layout starts from what the room will actually allow rather than a fixed idea of what a bedroom should contain.
The Victorian and Edwardian streets off Ock Street and Wootton Road bring a different set of decisions. Bay windows are common, and picture rails and coving are often original and worth keeping, so fitted wardrobe and dressing table runs are designed to work around these features rather than boxing over them. Chimney breast bedrooms here need each alcove measured on its own terms, since Edwardian builders rarely centred a fireplace with any precision.
Further out in Peachcroft, Northcourt and Dunmore, and in the newer estates on the edges of town, bedrooms tend to be more regular in shape but smaller in area, and ceiling heights are lower than the older streets closer to the centre. A recurring request from these households is combining a fitted wardrobe run with a small desk or shelving unit in a second bedroom that's doing double duty as an office for someone working from home, sometimes for an employer based at Milton Park or Harwell.
