When you want to make your bedroom feel personal and comforting, having a set of furniture that you pick every element of and that is designed to fit perfectly within your space is key. It can also help increase your home’s value and add some long-lasting practical space.
We developed our wardrobe designer to bring bespoke luxury furniture to as many people as possible. Anyone considering a New Year’s makeover can access it, use the simple interface and have a custom-made flatpack furniture kit ready to assemble.
The system is typically designed around clothes storage, with various options for racks, rails, shelving and drawers to make it easy to store everything you want.
However, a wardrobe is a space full of opportunities, and there are a lot of unique and creative ways to use one that people consider trying, particularly if they are repurposing a room that would perfectly suit a fitted wardrobe along one wall.
Many ideas that people suggest are perfectly replicable with our designer, whilst others may require a few adjustments to make them ideal for the purpose.
Here are just a few examples of what you can do with a custom-fitted wardrobe.
One of the easiest conversions you can make is turning a wardrobe into a library. In many cases, all you need to do is use the designer to order as many six-shelf wardrobes as you like and customise them to your heart’s content.
There is plenty of scope to adjust it however you like, as well. You can remove a couple of the bottom shelves and add a light and beanbag to make a comfortable reading nook, or add little details and markers to organise your books however you like.
The only addition that you cannot add to the wardrobe due to its doors is a library ladder, a la Beauty and the Beast.
The same approach can be used to store anything else, such as toys, trinkets, glasses and crockery. In fact, early armoires were more likely to be used to store something other than clothes until the tallboy and later the modern wardrobe were established parts of people’s homes.
Theoretically, you can use the shelves and drawers of a wardrobe as the basis for a home bar, but it depends on what you are looking for with your bar beyond a place to store glasses, drinks, stirrers and shakers.
A small bar that consists of one or possibly two pieces can work very well, but the more you add, the more the doors can get in the way and potentially harm the ambience.
The best solution to this is to add mirrors to the back of the wardrobe unit and install a small light on the ceiling to keep the optics illuminated.
It depends on what you want to precisely store within it, but it is certainly possible to fit all of the main elements of an entertainment centre into a wardrobe, so you can open or close it whenever you want to watch television or play computer games, but close it again to avoid any living room distractions.
The exact approach to take will depend on the size of the television in the room. Smaller TVs that are less than a metre long can be made to fit as long as you adjust your fitted wardrobe’s individual elements to fit, but anything bigger than that will need a more creative solution.
There are a few options for this, from having a wider wardrobe in the centre of your room, as long as it can fit your television inside, or creating an alcove for your television to sit between wardrobes, which can allow you to fit a particularly large TV in an unobtrusive way.
Alternatively, you could even fit your TV onto a swivelling arm that can store it vertically when not in use, before it is pulled out and turned 90 degrees to make it usable.
Remarkably, it is absolutely possible to turn a wardrobe into a home office space, complete with a tiny desk and pull-out office chair.
There are a few approaches you can take to make a home office. The simplest is simply to use a wardrobe with a chest of drawers at the bottom, and use the latter as the desk space for your monitor, laptop and anything you need, but this means that your desk chair will need to be stored elsewhere in the room.
Alternatively, you can order a full-length rack and place a small desk and chair within it.
