A wardrobe frames a bedroom in a way that even a bedroom often does not, and this makes the right choice of furniture vital for the aesthetics and comfort of one of the most important rooms in your home.
To that end, our DIY wardrobe builder helps you to create the custom flatpack of your dreams, and thanks to our newly devised presets, it is even easier to get started with your perfect luxury than ever before.
Thanks to our range of styling, finish and accessory options, there is a wardrobe to suit every style of home, from the clean lines and pure wood grains of Scandinavian minimalism to a rather more baroque, traditional theme.
Our wardrobe designer allows not only for highly modern designs but a celebration of the traditional, and through our various bespoke joinery options, we provide a remarkably complete history of wardrobes themselves.
This begs the question of which style of wardrobe came first, and which interior design style inspired it?
Whilst statement doors have existed for as long as major civilisations have, there was a distinct separation between ornament and utility.
King Louis XIV may have had particularly gilded and ornamented armoires, and other similar one-off statement pieces have existed in royal courts for centuries, but most people had basic wooden chests to store clothes and basic wooden doors to keep out the cold.
However, the Georgian style was the point where architectural and interior design styles started to become more accessible to wider stretches of the population, a culmination and metaphor for the changes in society following the English Civil War and Stuart Restoration.
Whilst its first form was seen with what we now know as Queen Anne style, the first universal door style that started to see significant popularity was the Georgian panel.
The beauty of the Georgian panel, possibly best epitomised by our Cairo door style, was in its distinctive simplicity, using a symmetrical set of panels (usually six) as the basis for a wide range of different styles.
Whilst Georgian design was hardly austere, it was the first architectural and interior design style that was at least theoretically universal; elements of it could be adapted for use not only in grand palaces and country houses but also in middle-class town and city dwellings.
The next movement would take this concept even further and develop the genesis for what would become the design language for the next few centuries.
As interior design has moved towards functionalism, or the idea that the aesthetic elements of a piece of furniture should celebrate its purpose rather than rely on excessive ornamentation, our perception of elegance has shifted towards the fundamentals.
One of the biggest shifts forward in this regard was the Shaker movement, a puritanical religious movement that had a remarkable effect on interior design once the Queen Anne style and Georgian movements had established the concept as we know it today.
It was far from the first utilitarian movement, but it was one of the first that became popular through choice rather than necessity, and its guiding principles would become the unlikely backbone of modernist design centuries later.
The origins were also somewhat unusual, emerging from the Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, a somewhat self-sufficient collectivist religious movement commonly known as the Shakers.
Believing that ornamentation, veneering and carvings were “deceitful”, they opted to create aesthetically pleasing designs that were “honest” and better suited their needs than many of the existing furniture styles of the day.
The impact of the Shaker movement is still seen today; we offer two interpretations of the classic style in our door options, in no small part because of the movement’s direct and indirect impact on what would become minimalism.
Both movements remain highly influential, partly because they emerged at the point where the armoire was slowly metamorphosing into the wardrobe, but also because the guiding principles of the Shaker movement would be rediscovered at the turn of the 20th century through modernism and later minimalism.
Whilst the motivation was far different, the notion of “form follows function” became a critical element towards the development of the fitted wardrobe, with each aesthetic component designed according to its function and with an emphasis on clean lines.
This became a vital element of the success of flatpack wardrobes, which necessarily required relatively minimalist designs in order to make them more practical to store and ship.
As wardrobe experts, we understand the traditions and styles that allow us to offer the made-to-measure fitted wardrobe kits we can, a lot of which can be credited to these 18th-century pioneers.
