A good wardrobe is one of those things you stop noticing once it works, and think about every day when it doesn't. If your bedroom robe is a jam of hanging rods and shoe piles, or you are fitting out a new room and starting fresh, a built-in wardrobe is usually the fix. Here is how the main options compare, what they are made from, and the rough numbers so you can plan before you get a proposal.
Sliding, hinged, or walk-in
The door style sets the feel of the room and how much floor you keep.
Sliding doors are the workhorse of built in wardrobes. They run on tracks, so they take no floor space when open, which is handy in a tight Illawarra bedroom or a kid's room where the bed sits close to the robe. The trade-off is that you only ever see half the wardrobe at once, and the tracks need a wipe now and then.
Hinged doors open fully, so you get a clear view of everything inside, and they tend to feel more like a piece of furniture than a fit-out. They need swing room in front, so they suit rooms with a bit of space to spare. Shaker-style hinged fronts are a popular look in the Southern Highlands where people lean traditional.
Walk-in robes are their own small room. If you have the floor area, a walk-in gives the most storage and the easiest access, and it hides the mess behind a single door. They cost more because there is more joinery, and often more of the room is given over to it, but for a main bedroom or a new build they are hard to beat.
Materials and finishes
Most built-in wardrobes are built from melamine or laminated board for the carcass and shelving. It is durable, easy to clean, comes in plenty of colours, and it is the sensible choice for the parts you do not see. The money and the look sit in the doors and the fronts.
Common finishes:
- Melamine or laminate for a clean, low-maintenance finish that suits most budgets.
- Polyurethane (poly) doors for a smooth painted look, in matte or satin, if you want the robe to blend into the wall.
- Timber or timber-look for warmth, which works well with the coastal and Highlands homes around here.
- Mirror or glass sliders to bounce light around a smaller room and save you a separate mirror.
Inside, the difference between an average robe and a great one is the fit-out: adjustable shelves, a mix of hanging heights for long and short items, drawers, and a spot for shoes and bags. That internal layout is worth more day to day than the fanciest door.
What built-in wardrobes cost
Prices move with size, materials, and how custom the job is, so treat these as rough guidance rather than a quote.
- A basic flat-pack sliding robe for a standard bedroom often lands in the low thousands.
- A made-to-measure built-in with a decent fit-out and nicer fronts tends to sit in the mid thousands and up.
- A full walk-in with custom joinery, drawers, and quality finishes can run higher again, depending on the room and the detail.
Treat those as a starting point, not a quote. The real number depends on your room size, the finish you choose, and whether the space is square and ready or needs building work first. We give a fixed-price proposal once we have seen the space, so you know the real number before work starts.
How are built-in wardrobes priced per metre?
Built-in wardrobes are usually quoted by the linear metre of wardrobe front, because almost everything in the job scales with width: the carcass, the shelving, the hanging rails, and the doors. A standard bedroom robe is around two to three metres wide, so that's the unit most quotes are built on.
What moves the rate per metre is the door type first, then the internals. Mirror and glass sliders cost more per metre than plain melamine sliders, polyurethane fronts cost more again, and hinged doors need more hardware per metre than sliders do. Add drawers, soft-close runners or a shoe rack and the rate climbs regardless of how wide the robe is.
Height matters too. A robe built to the ceiling costs more per metre than one that stops at standard door height, and it's usually the better value, since the extra metre of storage up top is cheap compared with the metre of floor a second cupboard would take.
Be careful comparing a flat-pack per-metre price with a joinery one. The flat-pack figure is generally for the components; measuring, scribing to out-of-square walls, and fitting are yours to organise or pay for separately.
Flat-pack or custom joinery
Flat-pack systems are cheaper and quicker, and for a plain rectangular room they can do a solid job. The catch is that they are built to standard sizes, so you lose space wherever your room does not match the module, and older homes around Wollongong rarely have perfectly square walls.
Custom joinery is measured and built for your exact space. It fills the awkward corners, matches the ceiling height, and lets you set the internal layout around what you actually own. It costs more up front, and for a lot of people the better use of the room and the finish is worth it, especially in a main bedroom or a home you plan to keep.
If you are weighing up a robe as part of a bigger renovation or a new build, it is worth planning it in early so the wiring, lighting, and wall positions all suit. Get the layout right and it is one of the small things that quietly makes the whole room work better.
Want a hand with this at your place? Get a free quote or call 0434 037 851.