Every house has at least one wall no catalogue was drawn for. Often it is the alcove beside a chimney, or a bedroom where the window sits forty centimetres too close to the corner for any wardrobe on the market. Standard furniture goes in anyway and leaves a gap at the end, which collects dust and, sooner or later, the ironing board.
Custom furniture is worth paying for where a room has a shape or a use that standard sizes don’t fit, and seldom anywhere else. In most of a house, a well-made standard piece is the better buy. The money for made to measure belongs to the few pieces that have to fit exactly, and we would rather say so up front than make you a bespoke bedside table.
Where made to measure earns its keep
Built-in storage is the clearest case. A wardrobe that runs wall to wall and floor to ceiling holds noticeably more than two freestanding ones with a gap between them, and in a bedroom with a sloping ceiling it may be the only thing that fits at all; there is more on that in bedroom storage ideas.
Sofas are a surprise entry. Sometimes it’s the room, but just as often it’s the staircase, because older buildings in Albufeira have turns that no standard three-seater will get round. A sofa made in two parts, or ten centimetres shorter, gets in where nothing from a catalogue will. (The rest of what to look for is in how to choose the perfect sofa.)
Tables made to an exact length make sense when the room is tight, as we said in the piece on choosing a dining table. Fabric is less obvious. Our atelier makes curtains and cushions to measure, which means the sofa and the curtains behind it can come from the same roll of cloth.
Where it doesn’t
An armchair, almost always. Good standard armchairs have been refined over decades by people who make nothing else, and a one-off rarely beats them for comfort. Bedside tables and coffee tables too; the catalogue does them well, and a made-to-measure version mostly adds weeks.
Nor is custom a way of chasing a look. Magazines like to present handmade, made-to-order pieces as a luxury revival, which Portuguese furniture-making finds a little funny, since it never stopped; we said as much in interior design trends. Made to measure is about fit.
How it works with us
It starts with someone from H&P Mobiliário e Decoração measuring the room, because a drawing from a floor plan misses the skirting board and the socket sitting exactly where the wardrobe door should open. From there we can draw the piece as a 3D project, so you see it in the room before anything is cut, and the wood and fabric samples are in the showrooms in Albufeira and Armação de Pêra to be handled rather than imagined.
The pieces are made by Portuguese workshops, some in the north around Paços de Ferreira and Paredes, where much of the country’s furniture industry has been for generations, and others further south. That matters later as well. A hinge that needs replacing in eight years is a phone call to whoever made it, which is part of why made-to-measure pieces tend to be kept (sustainable decoration says more).
It does take longer than taking something off the showroom floor, and how much longer depends on the workshop and the finish, so we give you a date once the design is closed rather than a guess before it. Delivery and assembly are ours. If you’d like to see the results in finished houses, the projects page is the honest answer; to start one, send us the measurements of the awkward wall.
