Abingdon's housing stock splits roughly into three eras, and each one poses a different wardrobe problem. The timber-framed and Georgian houses around East St Helen Street and the Market Place have low door heads, sloped ceilings in the upper floors and box rooms that were never meant to hold a modern wardrobe. Standard flat-pack furniture simply will not fit through some of these doorways, let alone sit square in the room once it's inside.
Move out to the Victorian and Edwardian streets off Ock Street and Wootton Road and the problem changes. These houses usually have a decent chimney breast in the main bedroom, which leaves two alcoves either side that are almost never the same width. We measure each one independently rather than assuming a mirrored pair, so both wardrobe doors close the same even though the carcasses behind them differ by a few centimetres.
Out at Peachcroft, Northcourt and Dunmore, and in the newer estates on the town's edges, rooms are squarer and walls are straighter, but ceilings tend to be lower and floor space in second bedrooms is tighter. A lot of the work we do here is for families who have outgrown flat-pack storage and want full-height, wall-to-wall wardrobes that recover space rather than eat further into an already small room. Some of these households have someone working from Milton Park or Harwell Campus who has converted a box room into an office and needs the remaining bedroom storage rationalised into one proper run.
