Recommendations for kitchen and bathroom designers/suppliers

[aquavit]

We are going to get a new kitchen and a new bathroom. Are there any companies that you would recommend (or NOT recommend)? Prepared to spend quite a bit of money so long as quality is good. We have a great builder but for the kitchen in particular I think we need specialist design. We're in Oxford.

well we used handmade kitchens of christchurch and they were great, and used their independent designer who was fab (you pay him seperately) very honest about the design, no hard sell on features.

i can only say what others said to me and i ended up acting on- check out the local independents. the prices are very often not as high a you expect them to be (we managed to undercut magnet by half) with much better quality and service.

oh and dont use bathstore if you want it to last longer than a year

I used Dolphin for a bathroom last year. They spent about a week and a half, with minimum disruption. They have a good range of fittings. I spent £9000 (new flooring, lighting, ceiling, separate shower, bath, sink, toilet, tiling).

thanks all, that is most helpful!

We bought our kitchen from John Lewis of Hungerford, and it's great quality, and v well fitted. Though this was a good 9 or 10 years ago, so not exactly recent experience.

Oh ffs. I'm reporting this post, architects4Homes. This is just spam - I can see your posts on half a dozen threads in this forum. A bona fide MNer recommending a particular company is one thing, but a specific commercial company crashing our boards and self-promoting right, left and centre is entirely different. Mumsnet charges for commercial advertising, in case you were unaware?

Bloody cheek

A4H -- inability to read, pay attention to, and respect clients is such an appealing quality in an architectural practice. Keep it up. The business will pour in.

Am watching with interest as also doing our bathroom now. Nowwearefour, what went wrong with your Bathstore stuff?

the stuff was delivered incorrectly, toilets a nightmare to fit, needed to be bought from elsewhere and for the stuff that we were able to keep it simply did not last- handles falling off, doors falling off. and it wasnt the build fit.

We have just ordered a kitchen from Optiplan - think the closest to you would be Swindon or Thatcham (Swindon is their head office). They make their own units so are a bespoke company as they can do odd sized cupboards etc (we didn't need that as we live in a modern box) but the price we got was the same as an off-the-shelf Homebase kitchen as their fitting costs were much lower, and they almost always have a few half price granites on offer as they own a granite company. Price in the region of £12 - £16k for a 12 x 12 kitchen inc worktops, fitting, hob, sink, fridge-freezer, extractor, microwave combi, dishwasher (we kept our own washing machine, oven). Can't comment from personal experience yet as they are not due till September (we're having building done first) but the design process was great - he re-drew the plans several times, changed the units, told us what bits we'd picked that wouldn't work for us and suggested compromises (and actually saved us money with that).