By Michael Jardine
“Where your architect can add enormous value to your home, in terms of refinement at every scale, is through the design and procurement of fitted joinery, which includes wardrobes. We have a profound relationship with the clothes that we wear, and we can develop this into a profound relationship with the spaces where we keep them.
This starts with the first marks on a plan: the initial moves to define a principal bedroom suite, or a coat cupboard in the hall by the front door, are based on hanging depths and fittings that take on the visual and haptic language of the inner sanctum or the point-of-arrival.
When the plans are finalised and have proportion and a sense of flow and procession, we look again at the wardrobe fittings in layout and look-and-feel and allow our discussions to touch on our profound knowledge of and love for material, proportion, and detail. From starting points of contemporary, modern, or traditional design, we’ll find the solutions that will feel instinctively right.
We can look at back-panels to wardrobes decorated to match the linings of your suits, timber veneers (matched to finishes of solid timber where required to achieve robust and resistant construction) and patinated metal trims. We’ve drawn and had made wardrobes with doors lined in leather or upholstered fabric, routed-in finger-pull handles, pivot hinges or butt-hinges with their knuckles set into a bead around a wardrobe door- the possibilities are almost endless! These are details that can echo the architecture at a finer scale or match a much-loved item of furniture, all to house the clothes with which you face the world.
In Listed Buildings, we can use wardrobes and other fitted joinery to reconfigure spaces to meet contemporary requirements and achieve layouts for which Listed Building Consent would be hard to obtain in a conventional language of plastered partitions. Room doors, especially to secondary spaces like bathrooms and cloakrooms, can be integrated into fittings and runs of wardrobes can stand off from historically sensitive cornice mouldings.
Increasingly, in conceiving of the very best spaces in which to live, we are looking to integrate comfort cooling, refined lighting with smart controls and other services to make an effortlessly controllable environment and the well-considered design of joinery fittings often provides the pockets of space in which to install equipment, pipes and ducts. We can therefore ensure functionality is assured with no disturbance to elegant finishes, profiles of walls and ceiling heights in principal rooms.”
