Looking for ideas for your custom-made supplies?
Generally, when furnishing or decorating a home, one must choose between buying more or less standard furniture from stores or having custom-made furniture designed . Since each home has its own constraints in terms of size and layout, custom-made furniture offers many advantages: it can be adapted to the available space, the room’s decor (or your personal taste), and your practical needs.
Why have a piece of furniture custom-made?
Designing the ideal piece of furniture
Having a piece of furniture custom-made means benefiting from the advice of a craftsman to design a piece that reflects your personal style, taking into account the constraints related to the room’s dimensions, as well as technical and practical considerations. Indeed, thanks to their experience and expertise, the carpenter or cabinetmaker can guide you toward the solution best suited to your needs. Whether you have a precise idea of the piece you want or are simply looking for inspiration, the craftsman will help you make the best choice.
Choose your own design
Choosing custom-made furniture allows you to personalize it to the fullest extent, resulting in a unique and original creation that will perfectly complement the room. Depending on your needs and preferences, you can choose from a variety of materials, shapes, colors, and accessories.
Making use of wasted spaces
A home often has wasted or underutilized spaces: a recess, an attic, a hallway, a high ceiling, the space under the stairs… These are all areas that can be used to accommodate custom-made furniture and storage. Transform your unused spaces into optimized storage!
Optimizing small spaces
In a small room, the aim is to optimize every square meter to make the most of the available space. This could involve features such as tall cupboards or a bookcase, a bench with built-in drawers and storage, or a mezzanine.
Custom-made furniture, what furniture should you have made?
A library
Need to store your books, magazines, CDs, DVDs, and decorative items in a dedicated, custom-made piece of furniture? A large bookcase will add character to your room and guarantee ample storage space. For this type of furniture, custom-made solutions allow you to maximize the available wall space, both in width and height.
A dressing room
Do you dream of being able to easily store and find all your clothes and shoes? If you have a large blank wall or a small, underutilized room in your home, you can consider creating the walk-in closet of your dreams! Thanks to custom design, you can create your own walk-in closet, choosing, for example, the type of door and opening mechanism (hinged or sliding doors), the materials (wood, glass, mirrors, etc.), the number and placement of shelves and hanging rails, and more.
A cupboard or a wardrobe
Do you have an unused nook or wall space in your living room, hallway, or another room in your home? Install a closet or wardrobe there! This type of custom-made furniture will allow you to make the most of the unused space in your home, adapting to the physical constraints of your walls (sloping ceilings, corners, space under stairs, etc.) and your storage needs.
An office
Design the desk that precisely meets your needs: choose its dimensions, select the materials, add a cabinet, one or more drawers, and cover it with a glass top… And if you have enough space, opt for a corner desk!
A room divider
If you have a large room and want to divide it into two without building a wall, you can have a room divider custom-made by professionals. In this case, the craftsman can offer you a “double-sided unit,” the dimensions and interior layout of which you can choose to optimize its storage capacity.
Other custom-made furniture
Many pieces of furniture can also be made to measure: kitchen furniture, bathroom furniture, sideboards, chests of drawers, TV and hi-fi units, beds, headboards, tables, sofas… In the end, the majority of the furniture in a house or apartment can be made to measure!
Choosing the right components for a custom-made piece of furniture
Having your furniture custom-made allows you to personalize it by choosing the materials, interior layout, and exterior appearance. All these customization options will make your furniture unique and fully functional.
The materials
A wide selection of materials will be offered by the professional in charge of designing your custom furniture. This generally involves selecting materials from suppliers they regularly work with. For the manufacture of custom furniture, certain types of wood panels are generally preferred:
- Particleboard: made of wood particles glued together, particleboard is a more or less rough and smooth material. It is used more for practical and utilitarian purposes than for decorative ones.
- MDF, or “medium-density fiberboard,” is composed of compressed wood fibers bonded together. It offers a neat finish, even in its raw state. It can be easily painted and decorated, and is easy to work with (it doesn’t crumble and cuts cleanly).
- Melamine or laminate: based on particleboard or MDF panels, each side of which is covered with a decorative paper coating. Several colors and finishes are available: matte, glossy, smooth, or brushed. This type of panel is easy to clean with water.
- Plywood: made of superimposed and hot-pressed wood panels, plywood is a particularly strong material from 15 mm thick.
- Solid wood is more expensive than engineered wood products, but warmer; it offers an unparalleled quality look, but will tend to warp over time. Pine and fir are the most economical options, but they are softwoods and easily dented. If you are looking for more refined and durable woods, consider oak, beech, or even teak.
Of course, other materials are available (metals such as steel, aluminum, iron, glass, stone, concrete, etc.), and it’s also possible to combine different materials (wood and metal, or wood and glass, for example). In some cases, upholstering the piece of furniture in leather or fabric can also be considered.
Specific fittings, options,a nd accessories
Depending on how you intend to use your custom-made furniture, certain practical or aesthetic modifications can be considered:
- Adjusting the dimensions and position of the shelves so that they can accommodate books, decorative objects, or even a television screen.Adding access panels to the back or top of the uunit to allow cables to pass through
- choice of sliding doors or hinged doors
- selection of door handles or knobs, or choice of a push-to-open system
- Choosing the furniture legs: height, shape, material…
- adding drawers, baskets, or sliding trays
- installation of curtain rods
- integration of spotlights…
The colors
Custom-made furniture means you have a wide range of colors to choose from, beyond those typically found in stores. In this context, you are in complete control, and it’s up to you to select the most suitable color(s) or color combination(s) for your piece from the available palette.
