Bedroom Storage: Wardrobes, Drawers and Matching Ranges
Everything here is furniture rather than boxes, baskets or hanging rails: the pieces that stay in the room and hold what a bedroom accumulates.
Most people arrive needing more than one of them, so the useful question is not which piece is best but which order to buy them in, and whether they will look like they belong together once they are all in the room.
Wardrobes and chests of drawers
These two carry the room, and the wardrobe decides everything else. It is the largest piece, it needs a specific depth to work at all, and it usually has only one wall it can go on. Settle the wardrobe against the room first; the rest of the furniture fits around whatever is left.
The chest is the piece to size second, and the honest question is whether you need one or two. A single wide chest gives you a surface as well as storage. Two narrower ones flanking a bed or a window can hold more and look more deliberate, and they suit a room where one long piece would block a radiator or a door.
Bedside tables and dressing tables
Bedside tables are usually bought in pairs, and it is worth doing that even for a single sleeper, because two matching pieces either side of a bed steady the whole wall. The height is the thing to check: level with the top of the mattress reads correctly, and much lower means reaching down for a glass of water in the dark.
A dressing table is the piece most often cut when the room is tight, and often that is the right call. A wide chest with a mirror above it does most of the same work. Where there is room for one, it earns its place by giving you somewhere to sit rather than stand, which changes the morning more than people expect.
Blanket boxes and benches
These go in last and are the first to be squeezed out, which is a shame, because the foot of the bed is usually the only floor in a bedroom that nothing else wants.
They take the bulk that has nowhere else to live once the wardrobe and the chest are full: spare duvets, winter blankets, the bedding for the spare room. Some are built to sit on and some are not, so that is the thing to check on the individual piece.
Matching bedroom furniture ranges
Most of the ranges here run across several pieces, so a wardrobe, a chest and a pair of bedside tables can be had in the same finish and the same detailing.
They are sold individually rather than as a set, which is usually the better way round. You can buy the wardrobe and the chest now and add the bedside tables next year, or take three pieces from one range and leave out the dressing table you have nowhere to put. Nobody has to buy a fourth thing to get the first three.
The one thing worth knowing is that ranges do not stay available forever. If the plan is to build up over a few years, buy the pieces you are certain about early rather than assuming the finish will still be there.
Matching is also the hardest thing to judge from a screen. Two photographs of the same oak, shot under different lighting and viewed on different phones, can look like two different woods. In our Enniskillen showroom you can put pieces from a range side by side and see whether they actually match, which is the only place that question gets a reliable answer.
Bedroom storage FAQs
Do your bedroom furniture ranges match?
Most of them run across several pieces in the same finish, so a wardrobe, chest, bedside tables and dressing table can be bought to match.
Can I buy a wardrobe and chest of drawers that match?
Yes, from most of the ranges here. The two are sold separately rather than as a pair, so you can take one now and the other later, or buy two chests and no wardrobe if that is what the room needs.
What furniture does a bedroom need?
A wardrobe and somewhere to put folded clothes covers most rooms. Bedside tables come next, then a dressing table or a blanket box if there is floor left for them.
Should bedside tables match the chest of drawers?
They do not have to, but pieces from one range save you the job of judging whether two finishes sit together. Where they differ, keeping the woods clearly different reads better than getting them nearly the same.
Which piece should I buy first?
The wardrobe. It is the largest, it has the fewest walls it can stand against, and every other decision in the room follows from where it ends up.