Modular Wardrobe Design: Internals, Fronts, Fit

Free preview · Survey the clothes before you draw the box

A wardrobe is a piece of measuring equipment. It only works if you measured the right thing, and the right thing is the client's clothing, not the wall. Run a wardrobe audit before the first sketch. Ask for counts, in these categories, for each person using the unit: - Long hanging: sarees on hangers, gowns, long kurtas, coats. Needs 1600 to 1800 mm of clear vertical height. - Short hanging: shirts, folded trousers on clamp hangers, short kurtas, jackets. Needs 900 to 1050 mm. - Folded stacks: t-shirts, jeans, knitwear, towels. Shelves at 300 to 350 mm vertical pitch. - Saree stacks (unhung): the single most underestimated category in Indian wardrobes. Wide shallow shelves or dedicated saree drawers, 150 to 200 mm pitch. - Small items: innerwear, socks, belts, ties, jewellery. Drawers 100 to 150 mm deep internally, compartmented. - Bulk and seasonal: quilts, suitcases, winter wear. Loft, always. Then convert counts into running millimetres. Rules of thumb: 25 mm of rail per shirt, 30 mm per kurta or jacket, 50 mm per saree on a hanger, 60 mm per heavy coat. A person with 40 shirts needs 1000 mm of short hanging rail, not "half a wardrobe". A folded stack is comfortable up to 300 mm high before it topples, so a 350 mm shelf pitch gives one stack per shelf and nothing more. Now compare the total against the room. If the numbers do not fit, that is the conversation to have at the survey stage — reduce the wardrobe or reduce the clothes — rather than at handover, when it becomes your fault. Almost every complaint about a wardrobe is a capacity complaint wearing the costume of a design complaint.

Free preview · Composing the internal elevation

The internal elevation is the drawing that matters most and the one clients understand least until they see it. Draw it to scale, with every shelf, rail and drawer dimensioned, and walk the client through it garment by garment. A dependable composition for a 900 mm wide bay, floor to 2400 mm: - Loft, 2100 to 2400 mm: one open compartment, separate shutter. - 1350 to 2100 mm: short hanging rail, 750 mm of usable height below the rail is wrong — give it 1000 mm so shirts clear the shelf below. - 750 to 1350 mm: three adjustable shelves at 300 mm pitch, or two drawers and one shelf. - 0 to 750 mm: two deep drawers, 350 mm internal each, on full-extension runners. For a two-bay wardrobe serving a couple, do not mirror the bays. Give one bay long hanging for sarees and gowns at full 1800 mm height, and the other short hanging over drawers. Mirrored bays look tidy on the elevation and serve nobody. Rules that hold across compositions. Put drawers at the bottom and never behind a hinged shutter you must hold open with your knee — either mount the drawer front flush as its own face, or use a drawer set inside an open bay. Keep the top hanging rail below 1800 mm; if the bay is taller, the space above becomes shelf, not rail. Allow 60 to 80 mm of clearance between the rail centre and the shelf above so a hanger hook can be lifted out. Rails should be an oval 30 by 15 mm section with a centre support on spans over 900 mm, because a round rail rotates and a long rail sags. Adjustability is worth the small cost: drill the side panels in a 32 mm system grid so shelves can move over the years. The client's clothing will change more than the carcass ever will.

Free preview · Hinged, sliding or walk-in

Three systems, three sets of trade-offs, and the choice is driven by floor space and access, not by style. Hinged wardrobes give you full access to the bay, the cheapest hardware, and the ability to hang accessories on the inside face of the shutter. They cost floor space: a 600 mm shutter needs 600 mm of swing clearance, which often conflicts with a bed. Use them wherever clearance allows, and keep shutter widths between 450 and 600 mm for comfortable operation. Hinge count follows shutter height — three hinges to 1600 mm, four to 2100 mm, five above — and the shutter should never exceed 2100 mm in one piece; split it with a separate loft shutter above. Sliding wardrobes need no swing space, which makes them the default in compact apartments and any room where the bed sits within a metre of the wardrobe. The price is access: you can only ever see half the wardrobe at once, and the track steals depth. A two-shutter slider on a 600 mm deep carcass leaves about 500 mm internal at the front bay and 470 mm behind the overlap, so plan the internals knowing the centre partition is permanently half-blocked. Specify a top-hung system with a bottom guide rather than a bottom-rolling one: bottom rollers collect dust and hair and become noisy within two years. Shutter weight drives the track rating — a 900 mm wide, 2400 mm tall shutter in 18 mm board with a mirror will exceed 50 kg, and an under-rated track will drop it. Walk-in wardrobes need a minimum of 1700 mm of room width for a single-side layout (600 mm unit plus 1100 mm passage) and 2400 mm for two sides. Open shelving in a walk-in looks superb in photographs and gathers dust in practice; in Indian cities, give at least the hanging bays a shutter or a fabric roller. A hybrid is often the right answer and rarely offered: sliding shutters across the run facing the bed, and a hinged tall unit at the end wall where clearance exists.

Free preview · Finishes, edges and hardware selection

Wardrobe fronts live in a bedroom, so the finish conversation is about touch and light rather than heat and water. Laminate on 18 mm ply or HDHMR remains the workhorse: hard, varied, forgiving, and cheap to repair by replacing a single shutter. Suede and matte-textured laminates have largely displaced gloss in bedrooms because they do not show fingerprints; check that the texture is not so deep that it holds dust. Acrylic gives a mirror gloss that visually enlarges a small room and shows every mark. PU paint gives the finest matte colour match to a wall and chips at the edges. Membrane shutters give shaker and louvre profiles seamlessly and are the most cost-effective route to a traditional look; keep them out of direct afternoon sun. Veneer suits a bedroom better than it suits a kitchen, and a wardrobe is the right place to spend on it — specify a matte PU topcoat and one continuous sequence of leaves across the run, not shutter-by-shutter. Edges matter more than the face. Specify 2 mm PVC or ABS edge banding on all four sides of every shutter and on the front edge of every carcass panel and shelf, machine-applied. Laser or hot-air edging gives a seamless line with no glue seam and is worth the premium on a dark finish where a white glue line is visible from across the room. Internally, a 0.8 mm band is acceptable on rear edges. Internal surface: white or light grey laminate inside, always. A dark interior makes the wardrobe a cave and forces more lighting than necessary. Handles and hardware. Profile handles (a continuous aluminium C or G channel routed into the shutter top or side) give a clean line and cost less than good knobs across a long run. Push-to-open is elegant and produces smudges on a matte finish and frustration when a shutter is slightly bound; if you use it, pair it with a soft-close hinge rated for the mechanism. For sliding shutters, a recessed vertical pull profile the full height is the standard and the most durable. Soft close on everything. It is a small line item and it is the difference between a wardrobe that feels engineered and one that feels assembled.