We left off with kitchens being developed from chipboard and Formica, soon Melamine was in regular use (this was chipboard coated on both sides with a washable surface). As you can imagine that saved a lot of time in the workshop for the small bespoke companies, but it also opened up a whole market for mass producing cost effective flat pack furniture.

So now we have MFI and soon to follow the death of local hardware store and the birth of DIY. Even though MFI was seen generally as poor quality it didn’t stop it being successful and with that other companies followed suite and it wasn’t too long before we had a choice of where to buy flat pack from. But hang on I’ve missed out the important bit, to be able to mass produce furniture the furniture had to be standard sizes.

Generally speaking up to now fitted furniture was made and installed by Norman round the corner working out of his garage (you get the idea) but now you could by the boxes from MFI and just get Norman to fit then for you, or even fit them yourself. But how did MFI know what size boxes would fit in you kitchen??

The problem was to be able to mass produce furniture standards had to be set and here was the birth of standard size units. I’m not sure where the standards came from exactly, If I had to guess I would say they evolved from various larger bespoke companies that were trying to increase turnover but certainly when the retail shop and the factory became separated standard sizes were required.

A classic example is a kitchen wall unit. Originally it was common for a wall unit to run all the way to the ceiling, as the wall unit and doors were being made for each kitchen after the kitchen had been measured. The flat pack version had to be a fixed size, but what size should they make it. Why not kill 2 birds with one stone and make the wall units the same height and with as the base units, then they don’t have to stock as many doors. As easy as that the standard 720mm tall wall unit was created.

So by now some nationwide companies had set standards in unit sizes, colours and door designs but the public new that if they wanted choice Norman was still around the corner. This worked for a while but with the world going technology crazy when Norman packed up his garage all the little Normans were learning how to be computer programmers and not learning dads trade. A new generation has come along that know nothing of Norman or what he did. This combined with the fast food “do you want a sink with that” type of approach to furniture. As in many other industries the old skills of bespoke fitted furniture are at risk of extinction.

You may think this is a bit extreme but the more I look for genuine bespoke companies the more fakes I find that are actually buying units in and passing them off as bespoke. Small companies that design, manufacture and install fitted furniture are few and far between but the good new is they are still out there. Sat beneath the expensive media cloud of kitchen advertising, waiting for lost soles that have been bounced form one showroom to another by salesmen full of crap. Looking for the answer to the eternal question “There’s got to be something better than this”.