Fitted Wardrobe & Oak Dressing Table

The existing built-in wardrobe was doing very little and taking up a lot of wall. It came out, along with the awkward boxed sections above and to the sides that had been built around it.

The storage

The replacement is planned around what actually needed hanging rather than a standard shelf height. There is a full-height section for dresses and two half-height sections for everything else, built in white MFC board with painted shaker doors in the client's chosen colour.

Behind the bedroom door — dead space in almost every room — we built an open-fronted shoe and bag cupboard in oak-effect board. Open-fronted deliberately: it is behind the door, nobody sees it, and things actually get put away when there is no door to open first.

The dressing table

Two 800mm shaker chests of drawers sit either side of a seated section, and across them runs a single slab of solid oak, roughly 2340mm long and up to 500mm deep, around an inch and a half thick.

The slab was sourced and prepared by hand, finished smooth and treated with clear polyurethane — clear rather than tinted, so the grain does the work and the surface still resists marking from the things that live on a dressing table.

We were straightforward with the client about what solid timber does: the slab carries natural imperfections, chosen for character rather than despite it, and it will move very slightly over the first year or two as it settles to the temperature of the room. That is timber behaving as timber. Anyone who tells you a solid oak top will never move is selling you veneer.

Services

Sockets were adjusted where the television was to be mounted, and an additional socket added beneath the dressing table so everything that lives there can stay plugged in rather than trailing a lead across the top.