Fitted or freestanding dressing room?

[LittleStranger]

We've got a fairly large but strangely shaped room leading onto our main bedroom and weighing up pros and cons of fitting this out as a dressing room with either fitted storage or buying individual pieces of furniture.

Does anyone have any experience/advice? Which is better value? Would decent fitted furniture add value?

Marking my place because, although I dont have any experience or advice, I am hoping to fit out a room as a dressing room in our new roof conversion so also looking for good advice.

Sorry to hijack but, if one went 'fitted', I always wondered about the pros and cons of having 'doors' versus 'no doors'. Is it simply 'no doors' can be dusty, but doors are pricier?

Ha, ha DH and I have been having a protracted (and very boring) doors vs no doors debate. I think no doors looks fresher, not as oppressive, plus you can see and get at all your stuff more easily.
He thinks with 'no doors' option you'll have to spend way more on decent carcasses, rather than hiding MDF carcass behind some better quality doors.

It's a mark of DH's indecision that he told me to 'ask MN' about the dressing room issue. Hopefully someone with taste and experience will be along later...

No doors looks good IF you keep all your clothes very tidy and sorted at all times, your clothes aren't squashed together and if the caracasses are good quality.

If you have a good look on Houzz.com, you'll see that the vast majority of photos of no-doors dressing rooms have a very careful selection of a few matching clothes specially for the photos. There are one or two with 'real wardrobes' on show in the photos, and they look pretty messy in comparison, even though there's nothing actually out of place or inappropriate.

It sounds like you've got a set-up like us, where you have to go through the dressing room to get to the bedroom, which means you're potentially walking through an area of mess every time you go in and out of the bedroom.

We've decided very firmly to go for doors for our new dressing room, with fitted wardrobes and chests of drawers with doors. Ours will be made by a local specialist joiner. I suspect it's going to cost a lot, though, and I'm not sure it will actually add any value. I think that buying separate pieces of furniture would be a lot cheaper, but as I say, ours is a funny shaped room.

I have a fitted wardrobe, in essence blocking off the 'odd shaped bit' and fuse box etc. On the other side of the room i have freestanding chests of drawers linked with a glass shelf.

Thanks for your advice.

Think we might end up compromising (as ever) on fitted cupboard to even out the funny corner and some separate furniture.
Just had a couple of local joiners round to quote and also a bedroom company. Joiners definitely seem better bet, but risky unless they come via word of mouth, and I just picked from yellow pages...

I think I've seen GrendelsMum on my local board so might have to badger her for a recommendation!

Bespoke would definitely be better for odd shaped spaces even if it was bespoke painted MDF (which I have had done before in a dressing room of my previous house). I mean how many visitors are going to stroke your wardrobe doors? Off the peg would be cheaper but it won't fit properly.

Get doors!!!! We are about to rip our walk in wardrobe/dressing room out. It's an open system with no doors and despite keeping the door into the room shut, all our clothes are filthy. Nightmare.

Agree with doors. You could get a carpenter to alter the IKEA Pax system for you if you are on a budget, that has loads of options for interior fittings.
We have rails at the mo (until I get myself organised to order said PAX units) and our clothes look messy and are getting dusty.

My wardrobe doors and internal rails are from here. The other internal fittings are lovely but £££

My chests of drawers are similar to these

The company cut the panels by the wardrobe doors round our cotswold stone walls and they look fab.

my dh dressing room is open without doors, his clothes got really dusty. I bought some Ikea curtains and hung them from the ceiling. They look great and solve the dust problem. I haven't had my room fitted out yet but think I will go for fitted with doors. You get more use out of the space when its fitted.

No probs, Little Stranger. I'll PM you his details - BUT I get mine done first!

p.s. Hi Pannacotta! How are you? I have a great video to send you (one step up from mere photos of the house...)

Thanks for the links OctopusSting, very stylish, will investigate their website further, but then probably faint when find out exactly how much you mean by £££. We've got Strachans coming to quote tomorrow, whose prices I imagine will be on the high side but don't know if the quality's any good, or how much room they leave to haggle.

Would be v grateful for those details GrendelsMum, but don't worry about us queue jumping, as the whole project in danger of being shelved yet again (no pun intended) so that we can put some new doors in our kitchen - if I can face the whole bi-fold vs traditional french doors debate.

Until it gets done my trusty argos clothes rails which have been with me since university will have to do!

LOL LittleStranger, you are not wrong!

However i will say that we had Harveys come out and 'design' the room and draw it up. The furniture was dull and boring and still came in at £2.5k ish . I think we paid £3k ish for ours, which is a hell of a lot, but definitely worth it for the style and full fitting. It was 8 years ago, so probably even more now!