How much do fitted wardrobes cost?

Almost all of the money is in two things: the doors and the carcass behind them. Everything else — hanging rails, shelves, a bit of trim — is cheap by comparison.

That is why price is usually quoted per linear metre of wall rather than per wardrobe. A 2.4m run and a 4.8m run take the same design time and the same fitter, but twice the material and twice the doors, so the metre is the honest unit. Mid-range work lands at £600–£900 a metre supplied and fitted. Plain painted MDF with simple doors can come in at £350–£600. Bespoke joinery in solid oak, ash or walnut starts around £900 and keeps going.

The second thing you are paying for is the fact that your walls are not straight. A freestanding wardrobe is built in a factory to one size. A fitted one is scribed to your skirting, your coving, the bow in the plaster and the floor that falls away towards the window. That work is slow, it is why fitted costs several times what flat-pack does, and it is also the entire point — there are no gaps and no dead space on top.

Hinged is cheaper. The doors bolt onto the carcass, they are adjusted in minutes, and if one drops a few years later you turn a screw.

Sliding doors run on top and bottom tracks that have to be dead level and square to each other, in a room where nothing else is. Getting two or three heavy doors to run smoothly and close flush takes far longer, and the gear itself costs more. Expect sliding to add somewhere between £200 and £600 per pair of doors over the equivalent hinged design, and more again if the doors are mirrored or glass.

The reason to pay it is floor space. A hinged door needs about 600mm of clear floor in front of it to open. In a small bedroom with the bed close to the wardrobe, that is the difference between a usable room and squeezing past — and no amount of money buys the floor back.

MDF is the standard and there is nothing wrong with it. It is stable, it takes paint better than timber does, and in a painted finish you cannot tell the difference once it is on the wall. Painted MDF shaker doors installed run roughly £600–£900 per metre.

Spray finishing costs more than hand painting but looks it — no brush marks, and an even sheen across a big flat door where every flaw shows. High-gloss and lacquered finishes typically add 25–40% over plain painted MDF, partly for the material and partly because they are unforgiving of dust while the work is going on.

Solid timber fronts — oak, ash, walnut — are the top end, from about £1,600 a metre. They are worth it where the grain is the point. If the wardrobe is going to be painted the same colour as the wall, you are paying for timber nobody will ever see.

One thing worth spending on at any budget: soft-close hinges or runners. They are a small uplift and they are the part of the wardrobe you touch every single day.

Plenty of people buy a modular system — IKEA PAX and similar — and want it fitted properly against the wall rather than standing free. That is labour only, and a different conversation about price.

For a standard run, expect £250–£600, or a joiner's day rate of around £180–£280 if they price it that way. Published trade figures put a two-door install nearer £300 and a four-door nearer £900, which gives you a sense of how fast it climbs with width.

What moves that number is not the units, it is the room. Sloping ceilings, a chimney breast, out-of-square corners and skirting that has to be cut back all add hours. So does making filler panels to close the gaps at each end, which is usually what separates a job that looks fitted from one that looks like furniture pushed against a wall.

If you want the units simply built and stood in place rather than fixed and scribed, that is wardrobe assembly instead, and it is far cheaper — £60–£120 for a flat-pack double.

Fitting is quick. Making is not.

For made-to-measure wardrobes, design and manufacture usually runs three to six weeks from the day you sign off the drawings. The fitting itself is typically one to two days for a single wall, and around two days for a 3m sliding-door run. Complicated jobs — multiple walls, sloped ceilings, a walk-in — can stretch to a week or more on site.

Ask when you get the quote whether the lead time is included in what you have been told, because three weeks sometimes means three weeks before they start making. Ask too whether they take the old wardrobes away and whether they make good the decorating afterwards. Filling and touching in where the old units stood is a real job and it is not always in the price.

On pure cost per cubic foot of storage, no. A freestanding double is a few hundred pounds and a fitted wall is a few thousand.

What fitted buys you is the space a freestanding wardrobe wastes: the foot of dead air above it, the gap behind it, the awkward corner it cannot reach into, the slope under the eaves. In a room with a chimney breast or a sloped ceiling, fitted will hold roughly half again what the same floor area holds in freestanding furniture, because it uses the full height and the full depth.

The argument against is that it stays with the house. If you are likely to move in the next couple of years, you are buying storage for the next owner. Agents generally treat good fitted wardrobes in a main bedroom as a plus, but it is a selling point rather than a sum you get back on the price.

Hinged doors instead of sliding, if the floor space allows it. That is the single biggest lever and it costs you nothing in storage.

Painted MDF instead of timber or gloss. Pick the finish by how it will look in that room, not by what is top of the range.

Keep the run simple. Every internal division, every drawer bank and every change of depth is more making. A long rail with a shelf over it stores a surprising amount for very little money, and you can add a drawer unit from anywhere later.

Do the decorating yourself. Filling, caulking and painting the wall around the new units is straightforward, and it is chargeable time if the fitter does it.

And get three quotes. The spread on fitted wardrobes is wider than on almost any other job in the house — the same wall can come back at £1,800 from a local joiner and £5,000 from a national brand, for work that looks much the same once it is painted.