Choosing your bedroom wardrobe

Choosing your bedroom wardrobe

The size and shape of your bedroom will dictate the size and proportions of your wardrobe. Your room might have alcoves or other nooks and crannies which would be perfect for a built-in bedroom wardrobe.

You should decide primeval whether you need to make alterations to the room’s physical layout, such as putting in walls to create a walk-in wardrobe or to divide the sleeping area from the rest of the room. Be aware that some structural changes can have a severe affect on the bedroom’s light, and therefore its overall ‘feel’. Be particularly careful whether your bedroom only has one light source, as even partially blocking this can have disastrous consequences for the whole bedroom.

Using fully-fitted wardrobes might free up space, but on the other hand they can overly dominate. They do have the advantage of turning an otherwise uneven surround into an unbroken surface. Sometimes separate furniture can give a room a lighter and more individual feel than built-in wardrobes.

If your bedroom is high ceiling-ed, a full length floor to ceiling built-in contemporary wardrobe might be too much, towering over you as you sleep (or try to!). You can lighten the expanse of doors of a fitted wardrobe in many ways: fitting mirrors on the doors (or even having the whole door as a mirror) can lighten a room and make it seem more spacious, as well as breaking the lines of larger doors.

Integrated or built-in bedroom wardrobes tend to be the most efficient users of space, and can of course be prefabricated uniquely to your stipulations and taste. They fit your room’s architecture, and so therefore do not leave any valuable space unused. Built-in wardrobes are on the whole however more costly than their free-standing counterparts – the spaces they occupy need to be measured individually and the wardrobe crafted to fit. This requires, in superior calibre wardrobes, use of craftsmen to finish the fitting – and this does not come cheaply!

A cheaper substitute to a ‘solid’ wardrobe is a curtained-off alcove or corner of the room. The artifact you select for the curtain can complement the room’s overall style and be a valuable addition to the whole room’s ‘feel’. However, endorsement from dust isn’t as effective as in a traditional wardrobe. However, ad hoc ‘wardrobe substitutes’ are easy to move, and assemble and disassemble very quickly, so they’re perfect for people with semi-nomadic lifestyles, such as students. Remember that the wardrobe as we know it now is a evenhandedly current invention: a curtain over an alcove was preferred method of clothes storage right up to the time of the Tudors!

A halfway point between an improvised wardrobe and a solid wardrobe is a clothes tent – an old solution in competition with today’s modern wardrobes: think of an old soldiers’ campaign furniture, and you have some intent of the style. There’s a frame structure prefabricated of metal tubes or wood, from which hang cloth shelves or clothes. The cloth shelves store smaller items such as shoes and folded clothes. There’s an outer cloth cover that fits over the internal frame, and the doors have tiebacks to grant easy access. A clothes tent is movable – more easily than a standalone wardrobe, though of course less easily than a easy clothes rail.

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