Most of the joinery we fit in prime and super prime houses goes into buildings somebody is already living in. That single fact changes more about how a commission is run than any detail on the drawing.
The programme is the constraint, not the making
In an empty new build, joinery arrives when the building is ready for it. In an occupied house, it arrives when the household can absorb it — around school terms, around the shooting season, around a client who works from home three days a week, around a kitchen that has to keep working while the scullery beside it is stripped out.
We would rather agree a shorter, harder window and hold it absolutely than take a generous one and drift. A fortnight that starts and finishes when we said it would is far less disruptive than three weeks that becomes five.
What we settle before anything leaves the workshop
- Access route. Which door, which stair, which corner. Measured, not assumed.
- Section sizes. If a wardrobe cannot turn the half-landing in one piece, it is designed to arrive in three and read as one.
- Protection. Floors, balustrades and the route in, before the first item is carried through.
- Power and noise. Which operations happen on site and which go back to Mickfield.
- Working hours. Agreed with the household and, in a mansion block, with the managing agent.
Finishing is the part people underestimate
Spray finishing on site in an occupied house is a negotiation with everybody else in the building — the smell, the masking, the dust, the hours where nobody else can work in that part of the house. So wherever the design allows, we finish in the workshop and fit finished.
That pushes difficulty backwards into the making. Components must be dimensionally right first time, because there is far less scope to plane and adjust something that is already polished. It is harder for us and much easier for the client, which is the correct way round.
Mansion blocks and estates have their own rules
In prime central London a great deal of the work is in blocks with managing agents, porters, booked lifts, restricted delivery windows and a requirement to notify neighbours. None of that is joinery, and all of it will stop a joinery programme dead if it is discovered in week one rather than at survey.
We ask about it early because the answer often changes the design. A dresser that cannot come up in the lift is a dresser that gets made in sections.
Dust, and the honest version of it
Every workshop says it is clean. What matters is what is actually done: extraction on site tools, sealed routes rather than open doors, sheeting that is fixed rather than laid, and a proper clean at the end of each day rather than at the end of the job. In an occupied house the client is inspecting the site every evening whether they mean to or not.
One team, start to finish
Installation is by our own fitting team. We have never sub-let it. In an occupied house that matters more than anywhere else, because the people in the building are the same people every day, they know the household, and when something needs a judgement call on site they can make it against the drawing they have already seen.
What to send us
Photographs of the room, the access route from the front door inwards, and a note of any fixed dates the household cannot move. From that we can tell you whether the programme you have in mind is realistic before anybody commits to it.
Reeve & Co Interiors designs, draws, makes and fits bespoke joinery from its workshop at Mickfield, Suffolk. Visits to the workshop are by appointment.