Bespoke Mirrored Wardrobes

Mirror is one of the more useful finishes available on a hinged wardrobe door, because it earns its place twice over: once as a genuine dressing mirror, and once as a way of returning light and a sense of space to a room. Neither benefit works well by accident, though, which is why we treat mirror as a specified finish with its own set of decisions rather than a simple substitution for a painted panel.

Full mirror doors give the largest reflected surface and the most obvious sense of extra space, and they suit a run where the wardrobe itself is the room's principal dressing point. Partial mirror — a panel set within a shaker or flat frame, rather than the whole door — reads as more furniture-like and works well where a fully mirrored wall would feel too stark for the rest of the room's finishes. Both are built from the same door proportions we would use for any hinged wardrobe, since mirror is a facing rather than a different construction method.

Reflected light is worth thinking about at the position stage, not just the finish stage. A mirrored door opposite a window returns daylight further into the room; one facing a wall does very little for the space beyond the dressing function itself. Where a run includes several doors, we sometimes recommend mirroring only the doors that face a useful light source or sightline, rather than the whole run by default.

Dressing use is the other half of the brief. A single full-length mirror set at a comfortable viewing distance is often more genuinely useful than several smaller ones spread across a run, and we discuss where you actually get dressed in the room — which is not always directly in front of the wardrobe — before deciding where the mirrored doors should sit.

Frame finishes matter more with a mirrored door than a painted one, since the edge of the mirror is far more visible against a frame than a painted panel is against its own surround. Slim brass, blackened steel or timber frames are all options, chosen to sit with the handles and hardware used elsewhere in the room.

We build hinged mirrored wardrobes rather than sliding mirror systems; the same considerations around door proportion, swing clearance and hinge specification that apply to any hinged wardrobe apply here too, since a mirrored door is generally a little heavier than an equivalent painted or veneered one and needs hardware specified accordingly.

Done with some restraint, a mirrored wardrobe stops being a purely functional dressing aid and starts doing genuine work for the room's proportions — which is really the point of specifying it in the first place.

Part of our fitted wardrobes collection