Planning bespoke joinery early in a renovation project

A renovation touches a room's architecture, services and finishes at the same time, and fitted furniture sits within all three. Where we are brought into a renovation early — while wall positions, electrical layouts and flooring are still being decided — our joinery can be planned properly around the room rather than fitted around decisions already made without it in mind.

This applies across the kinds of spaces renovations commonly reshape: kitchens, wardrobes and dressing rooms, home offices and studies, media walls, home libraries and general storage. Each of these depends on decisions that are otherwise easy to make without furniture in mind — a socket position in the middle of a run of units, a door swing that clashes with a wardrobe carcass, a floor finish that changes level exactly where a plinth needs to sit.

We are a furniture and joinery specialist, not a construction company. We do not carry out structural alterations, electrical, plumbing or gas work, and any renovation that needs those services should have its own appropriate trades in place. Our contribution to early planning is to flag where furniture depends on a decision the wider project needs to make, not to make that decision ourselves.

Involving us later in a renovation is still possible, and much of our work happens this way. It simply means designing furniture to fit decisions that have already been fixed, rather than shaping some of those decisions in the furniture's favour from the outset.

Fitted furniture, once manufactured, is difficult to alter, and a renovation involves several decisions that affect where and how it fits: wall positions, services layouts, floor levels and finishes. Where these decisions are made without furniture in mind, the furniture is left to work around whatever remains — sometimes successfully, sometimes at the cost of storage capacity, proportion or a clean junction with the surrounding room.

Being involved early does not mean we take over decisions that belong elsewhere in the renovation. It means we can flag, in good time, where a decision affects furniture we will later be asked to design, so the people making that decision have the full picture before it is fixed.

We ask to see the electrical and lighting layout as early as it exists in draft form, so furniture positions and services positions are developed together rather than one dictating to the other after the fact. The same applies to flooring: knowing the finish and its build-up height in advance lets us set plinth heights correctly the first time.

Where a renovation's finishes schedule is still being decided, we can work with draft information and revise our drawings as it firms up, provided we are told of changes before manufacture rather than after.

Manufacture takes place in our Derbyshire workshop once room dimensions, services positions and finishes are confirmed. Installation is carried out by the people who made the furniture, sequenced against the renovation's own programme so that fitting happens once the room is genuinely ready, and other trades are not disrupted.

Where a renovation's programme changes, as many do once work is underway, we ask to be told as early as possible so installation can move without conflicting with other trades still finishing the room.