Henley bedrooms rarely come in standard shapes. In the Georgian and Victorian townhouses around New Street and Hart Street you get tall ceilings, deep original alcoves either side of a chimney breast, and skirting and cornice profiles that a flat-pack wardrobe was never designed to sit against. On the roads climbing towards the Chilterns and Remenham the rooms open out into larger, more regular principal suites, but the expectation on finish is, if anything, higher again. Either way, a wardrobe bought off a shop floor and pushed against the wall looks exactly like what it is.
Fitted wardrobes solve the practical problem and the appearance problem at once. Built to the actual dimensions of the room, a run can go from floor to cornice and wall to wall, using the full height of a Georgian ceiling rather than leaving a dusty gap above a standard carcass. In riverside apartments with long, clean sightlines, a fitted run reads as part of the architecture rather than as furniture that happened to arrive. We survey the room properly, including wall lean and ceiling drop, before anything is drawn, because in a period house those two figures are rarely zero.
Everything is designed in CAD before manufacture, so you see the elevation, the door style and the internal split of hanging, shelving and drawers before we commit timber to it. Carcasses and doors are then built and sprayed in our own workshop at Ipsden, not finished on site, which matters in a town where clients look closely at how a door gap runs. If the property is listed or sits within Henley's conservation area, any consent needed for altering fabric such as fireplaces or cornice is the homeowner's responsibility to confirm with South Oxfordshire District Council; we design the joinery to work with what is already there rather than assume changes are permitted.
