If you've been to our Milton Keynes showroom, there's a good chance you've stood in our kitchen display and never once wondered whether we do bedrooms too. Fair enough, it's not exactly plastered across the door. But we do, and this project in Castlethorpe is a nice example of why it's worth asking about.
What was the room being used for before?
Not much, if we're honest. It was a spare bedroom in a family home, and like a lot of spare rooms, it had slowly turned into the place where things went when nobody knew where else to put them. There wasn't a dedicated hanging space that actually worked for the room, so clothes ended up stored wherever there was room for them.
Belinda, who lives at the property, wasn't looking to redecorate the whole room or change its purpose. She just wanted one thing done properly: a dedicated space to hang clothes, built to actually fit the room rather than a flat-pack unit squeezed in as an afterthought.
Why fitted wardrobes instead of freestanding furniture?
Fitted furniture earns its keep in rooms like this one. A freestanding wardrobe has to be a standard size, which means either wasted space beside it or a squeeze to get it through the door in the first place. Fitted units are built around the actual dimensions of the room, corners and all, so every centimetre of wall space is doing something useful instead of sitting empty.
That mattered here because of the room's shape. Part of the room has a fitted wardrobe run that wraps around an angled corner, which is where the diagonal corner wardrobe earns its keep. Elsewhere in the room, on a different wall, sits a separate freestanding wardrobe, and it's positioned slightly away from the corner rather than pushed flush into it. That's down to a soil stack boxed into the wall behind it, which couldn't be moved, so the wardrobe was set to work around the pipework rather than fight it. It's the kind of detail you'd never notice unless someone pointed it out, which is really the point.
How did the design process actually work?
The customer came into the showroom first, having already spotted the Verona Cashmere finish on display and decided it was the one. From there, our designer, Genna, visited the property to talk through the practical side, how much hanging space was needed, whether shelving or a shoe rack made more sense in places, what kind of clothes would actually be going in, and which door style would suit the room.
That visit fed into a full design, and she came back into the showroom to go through the internal layout in detail. A few of the internal configurations changed at that stage, mostly around how much was open hanging versus shelved, which is a normal part of getting a fitted design right. You don't always know exactly what you need until you can see it drawn out in front of you.
As Belinda isn't especially tall, reaching a fixed rail at the top of a full-height wardrobe would have been a daily annoyance rather than a design flourish. Genna suggested a pull-down hanging rail instead, and she tried the demonstration unit in the showroom before committing to it. It's a small addition, but it's the sort of thing that makes a wardrobe genuinely usable rather than just good-looking.
What furniture went into the room?
The finished layout uses the Verona Cashmere Painted range: a mix of tall wardrobes in 800mm and 1000mm widths, some with fully open hanging and others fully shelved, a diagonal corner wardrobe to make sense of that awkward angle, a pull-down hanging rail, and a wardrobe section with drawers built in below the hanging space. Cornice along the top and matching plinths at the base give it the finished, built-in look rather than anything that reads as bolted-on furniture, and the handles are brushed nickel throughout.
This was a supply-only project. The customer already had her own fitter lined up, so our part was the design, the order, and getting the right furniture delivered, while the installation itself was carried out independently.
Is this the same furniture used in your kitchen displays?
As it happens, yes. Verona is a Crown Imperial range, and Crown Imperial is the same manufacturer behind a number of the kitchens on display in our Milton Keynes showroom, including their own Verona kitchen collection. You can see the full range we stock on our Crown Imperial kitchens page. It's actually a slim shaker design with a subtle stepped frame, available in over twenty painted shades, and the same silhouette carries across from bedroom to kitchen. Crown Imperial make both under one roof, at their own factory in Kent, which is exactly why the styling lines up so neatly between rooms.
That crossover is genuinely useful if you're thinking about a whole-house refurbishment rather than one room at a time. A kitchen and a bedroom don't need to match in an obvious, matchy-matchy way, but there's something satisfying about a home where the door profiles and finishes feel like they belong to the same family. It's also come up more with open-plan layouts, where a kitchen is often visible from a living or dining space and the design language ends up carrying further through the house than it used to. The same logic applies at the smaller end of the scale too. In a studio flat, where a kitchen and a sleeping area might be a matter of metres apart, having wardrobe doors that echo the kitchen cabinetry can make a small space feel considered rather than cobbled together.
Would TABO's design service work for a smaller project like this?
Yes, absolutely! Fitted bedroom furniture is a much smaller undertaking than a full kitchen or bathroom, there's no plumbing, no appliances, and nothing structural to plan around beyond the room itself. But it still benefits from the same design process: a proper visit to measure and discuss what you actually need, a full layout showing how everything fits together, and a specification detailed enough for a fitter to work from without guesswork.
You don't need to use our fitting service to take advantage of the design side, as this project shows. Whether you bring your own fitter, or would like a recommendation, we're happy to support either route. Our design services page has more on how that process works if you'd like to see it before getting in touch.
What did Belinda think of the finished result?
She was delighted with it, and has since come back to us for a bathroom project too, currently in progress. She left us a review on Trustpilot after the bedroom was finished:
You can also see more testimonials from other customers on our Trustpilot profile.
Get in touch
If your spare room, guest bedroom, or main bedroom could use a proper fitted solution, we'd love to help. You can pop into our showroom in Milton Keynes to see some of our ranges in person, browse finished projects for inspiration or take a look at our Houzz profile, or get in touch through our contact page to arrange a visit. Milton Keynes is home base for us, but plenty of our projects take us further out too, into Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, and Northamptonshire, with the odd trip out to Hertfordshire and Oxfordshire besides. If you're not sure whether you're in reach, just ask. You can see the areas we cover in more detail on our service areas page.
