Big built-in wardrobe swallows chimney breast

ajmoran · 31 Jul 2009

I needed a bedroom wardrobe to work around a chimney breast and here is the (almost) finished result. All 3000mm by 2230mm and 300Kg of it.
Full disclosure: the entire piece was designed with my Templates by numbers online system. Hopefully this will shed more light than the other thread on Templates by numbers.:?

The room has an awkward chimney breast, but rather than build units either side of it, I decided to cover it completely with a shallow cabinet. Here is the space during the cabinet install. Note the plinth to bring the cabinets to the same level. The newspaper taped around the floor is to stop any potential dust coming through where I'd removed the skirting board in this draughty 1950s house. A piece of wood is attached to the ceiling (and through to the joists) and the tops of the cabinets will be screwed into this. The cabinets are designed to stand just short of the coving so I didn't need to make a mess hacking plasterwork.

All the cabinet carcasses in place and testing the position of hanging rails. The shallow cabinet will be used for belts, lotions and potions etc.
The carcasses are 18mm Melamine faced MDF, the doors are 18mm Birch Ply and the backs are 8mm Birch Ply. The colour variation across the backs is extreme but I thought that makes for a nice surprise on opening the doors of each cabinet.

The drawer units are made up of comb jointed boxes with a false front applied (false front not attached yet). The comb joints are progressively sized to match the drawer heights.

The drawer box comb joints were cut on the bandsaw, using a template - of course

Some of these drawers are huge - 770mm wide, 387mm high and 470mm deep - a job for a quality runner. I used Blum Tandem with the TIP-ON option so it is push to open. I used TIP-ON on the doors as well so the whole unit is handle-less.

Pictures of the completed unit.

Cheers
Andrew

wizer · 31 Jul 2009

Very nice Andrew. But I must say, I don't think the design sits well without handles.

BradNaylor · 1 Aug 2009

Nice job.

I like the handle-less design but you really need to replace the drawer front second from the top. It stands out like a sore thumb.

And why didn't you make the doors all the same size?

Brad

OPJ · 1 Aug 2009

Very nice, a good use of available space. Although, I do agree with Brad's comment on the drawer front - the bottom two should be okay but that is a stark contrast from the rest. :? Otherwise, I think it all works really well.

ajmoran · 1 Aug 2009

Thanks for the comments.

Wizer - Because the doors are pretty much floor to ceiling and occupy most of the wall width I had this idea of a kind of wood paneled room effect and I didn't want handles in the way. You did make me revisit this decision though!

Brad, OPJ - Drawer number 2 will be sanded down to get the colour match. The false fronts were applied in a hurry to meet a parents-in-law visit deadline ("have you finished that wardrobe yet?") and the false drawer fronts (Birch ply) accidently got a suntan whilst awaiting fitting - Drawer number 2 must have been top of the stack

A lot of this was built outside and in the recent sunny weather I found that unfinished Birch would darken noticeably in as little as 2hours.

Door widths - The doors are a variety of widths for a couple of reasons. Firstly there were size constraints to get the carcasses to fit around the chimney breast and ensure the doors would open with various bed placement options.
But the main reason was to be a design feature! It's a 1950's house and I wanted to reflect the trend for geometric designs of that time. All the door widths and drawer heights are actually geometrically related to each other. The four doors from the left follow a Golden Mean progression for example. Whether it is successful overall is a matter of taste I guess but it's good to aim for something whether you hit it or not

From a practical perspective the door sizes were calculated with my system and cut with a cutting service that uses a computer controlled beam saw so the extra cost (in terms of additional setup time and possibility of introducing measurement errors) of making differently sized doors was zero.

Cheers
Andrew