A home office, Chinese style – made to order for a very happy customer!

Our latest container of ‘Classical’ Chinese furniture arrives next week. most of it already presold and including around 30 pieces that have been produced ‘to order’ according to specifications that we have agreed with customers. In most cases these tend to be quite small tweaks to our standard designs – larger or smaller versions of our dining tables for example, or a different finish than standard for a painted cabinet. Sometimes though we will work with a customer to come up with something quite unique and this is always rewarding as we go from initial discussions for the design of a piece of furniture through to seeing the finished piece.

One such piece arrived on a recent container and our customer in London received it a couple of months ago. She was delighted with the final product and was kind enough to share photos of the cabinet sitting proudly in her apartment. The brief for this piece was to come up with a design for a cabinet that would act as a home office – containing space for PC monitors, printer and keyboard as well as storage for suspension files and other office equipment. Our customer wanted a design that would allow her to shut everything away out of site when not in use, disguising the practicality on the inside with a wow factor on the outside.

The resulting design, shown in the initial drawing and photos of the final cabinet above, was based around our popular ‘Shanxi Painted Cabinet‘, finished in black lacquer with gold leaf and traditional paintings of children against an oriental landscape. Together with the customer we created a design in two parts. The top section holds PC equipment while the bottom, separate section includes a filing cabinet and drawers. The doors on each section are mounted on normal hinges, but include a second set of hinges fitted in the middle, allowing them to fold back on themselves to reduce the space required. The shelf for the computer keyboard pulls out on runners, fixed with chains allowing our customer to sit more comfortably at the ‘desk’. The filing cabinet on the right of the bottom section, and the adjacent drawers, are hidden behind the decorated doors when the unit is closed.

The whole design offers an extremely neat solution for hiding away a home office, and with the doors closed, the cabinet is a truly stunning piece of furniture.

For further details about our ‘made to order’ service or if you would like to discuss having a similar piece made, give me a call on 0800 0886800 or contact us through the website.