When it comes to furnishing your home, there are many options available to you. From flatpack Swedish furniture to prebuilt warehouse furniture, made on a mass production line to keep the costs down. Or you could opt for entirely bespoke furniture, made to suit not only your style, but also the uniqueness of your home. The only question that this leaves you with is, freestanding or built-in?
Freestanding Furniture
Freestanding furniture has a number of advantages, but can also hold some disadvantages. Starting with the advantages, the biggest plus is that if you decide to re-organise your room, it is easy enough to move (maybe a touch heavy when it is bespoke, but still moveable), this means that if you get bored of a room easily, you can swap it around at will, or even move the furniture from room to room. Secondly, the upkeep of treatment/painting is made somewhat easier as you can manoeuvre the furniture to get to everything. So if you are likely to change the colour or your furniture, or keep on top of the treatments, it is much easier.
Something we try and avoid discussing when it comes to bespoke furniture, however, we all know it happens is the sale of furniture, if you are likely to sell-on your furniture at some point in its life, freestanding makes this easier and possible, where built-in is more difficult.
A couple of disadvantages of freestanding furniture include the reduced level of stability. For example, a full wardrobe of clothes is more stable when it is built-in and attached to the walls, than that which is freestanding (however, bespoke furniture is significantly more stable than flat packed). Another disadvantage is that you might lose unique bits of space that cannot be incorporated into your freestanding design, such as nooks and crannies that can be utilised with built-in furniture.
Built-in Furniture
As with freestanding furniture, built-in-furniture has a mixture of positives and negatives, meaning that you need to weigh up both to ensure that you are making the right choice for you and your home.
One of the biggest advantages of built-in furniture is the ability to utilise every inch of space that is available, even if it is in the form of a nook. Whether you are having built-in wardrobes, kitchen units or a cupboard under the stairs, we ensure that each little space can be used. With freestanding furniture, you might lose these little spaces thanks to the back or side of the furniture covering them, but built-in means that these barriers don’t exist and the space can play home to an extra shelf or two. This also means that if you have a room that is an odd shape, you can make the most of the whole space, whereas some furniture which has been built square would not sit comfortably in the space.
With built-in furniture, we can ensure that extra safety measures and precautions are taken to increase the stability of the structure. Whether this means that extra timber is required to be used as support or we affix the furniture to the wall or floor with additional methods.
Opposite to the freestanding, built-in-furniture means that this is fixed into place, meaning that if you do decide to move around your room, this will need to be left in place and the rest of the room moved around with this in mind. Depending on the area that the built-in piece takes up, it can sometimes mean that the rest of the room will not fit in any other configuration, thus meaning that the room has to stay as is.
Whether you opt for freestanding or built-in furniture, with bespoke joinery from Brinard Joinery you can ensure that the furniture you need if uniquely designed not only to suit your style, but also to suit your space, so whether your walls are square, or you have uneven walls and floors, we can ensure that your furniture is a perfect fit, and is built to last as long as you need it to. We don’t cut corners in our workshops (unless you need it to fit a certain space!), that’s why each product takes its time, ensuring that the highest level of quality is all that leaves our hands.
For more information about bespoke furniture from Brinard Joinery, contact a member of our team today who will be more than happy to assist you. You can also check out some of our previous projects in our other projects collection, or head over to our latest news for more ideas in and around your home.