Will It Actually Fit? Fitted Wardrobe Dimensions, Explained
1 September 2026 8 min read Cardiff & South Wales
The numbers that decide it
550mm of clear internal depth is what a coat hanger needs. Under about 500mm, clothes have to hang sideways instead.
Sliding doors cost you roughly 100mm of that depth — and half the opening is always covered.
Hinged doors need about 600mm of clear floor in front to open properly.
A standard 2.4m ceiling divides neatly into drawers, hanging and a top shelf — but only if you decide which hanging you need first.
Chimney breast alcoves are never square. That is the whole argument for fitted over freestanding.
Most wardrobe disappointments are not about the finish. They are about a measurement
nobody discussed: a rail too shallow for coats to hang straight, a slider that hides half the wardrobe, a
drawer that fouls the skirting. None of it is complicated, and all of it is decided before anything is cut.
Here are the numbers we design to, and what each one actually buys you.
1. Depth: the 550mm that decides everything
A clothes hanger is around 450mm across the shoulders. Add the garment, a little air, and the thickness of the
door, and you need about 550mm of clear internal depth to hang clothes facing you in the normal
way. That is why a fitted wardrobe carcass is typically built at around 600mm deep — it is the hanger
working backwards.
Shallower than that and hanging front-to-back stops working: the doors either will not close or your coats live
permanently squashed. The fix is not to force it, it is to change the mechanism — a
pull-out side-facing rail hangs clothes along the wardrobe instead of across it, and works
happily at 350–400mm. It holds less, and you are pulling a rail out each time, but it turns dead depth
into usable storage.
Depth is the one dimension you cannot argue with afterwards. Everything else in a wardrobe can be re-planned; the wall behind it cannot move.
2. The vertical stack: what a 2.4m ceiling gives you
Once depth is settled, height is a budgeting exercise. Take a typical Cardiff bedroom at around 2.4m floor to
ceiling, allow for a plinth at the bottom and a scribe at the top, and you have roughly 2.2m of usable internal
height to divide up. What you divide it into depends entirely on what you actually own.
Long hang — coats, dresses, longer garments. Needs about 1,400mm of clear height under the rail.
Double hang — shirts, jackets, folded trousers on two rails. Each tier needs about 1,000mm, so the same height holds twice as much.
Drawers — 150–250mm each depending on what goes in them.
Top shelf — 350–400mm, which is where the suitcase and the spare duvet live.
The commonest planning mistake is to give an entire wardrobe over to long hang because it feels generous. Most
people need one bay of it at most; the rest earns far more as double hang and drawers.
Most wardrobes we plan end up one bay of long hang and the rest double hang. It is the difference between a wardrobe that looks generous and one that holds your clothes.
3. Hinged or sliding: it is a floor space question
Sliding doors look like the space-saving option and sometimes they are, but the trade is real and it is worth
understanding before you choose.
A hinged door needs roughly 600mm of clear floor in front to open fully. In
return you get the whole opening, every shelf visible at once, and doors that can be any width up to about
600mm before they start to sag on their hinges.
A sliding door needs no floor space at all — which is why it wins in a narrow room, or
where a bed sits close to the wardrobe. The cost is that the panels have to pass each other, so you lose around
100mm of internal depth to the track, and you can only ever see half the wardrobe at a time.
If a bed, a radiator or a doorway sits within about 600mm of the wardrobe front, sliders stop being a style choice and start being the answer.
4. Alcoves are never square, and that is the point
Cardiff's Victorian and Edwardian terraces almost all have chimney breast alcoves, and they are the natural home
for a wardrobe. They are also, without exception, not square. Walls lean, plaster bows, and the opening at the
top is routinely 10–40mm different from the opening at the bottom.
A freestanding wardrobe simply cannot deal with that. It sits at the tightest point and leaves a tapering gap
down one side — the gap that collects dust and makes an expensive piece of furniture look like it wandered
in from somewhere else. A fitted unit is built slightly undersize and closed out with
scribe fillets, tapered on site to follow the wall exactly. That is the actual difference
between fitted and freestanding, and it is the reason fitted looks like part of the house.
This is why we measure in three places, top, middle and bottom, and why a quote given from a single width is a quote given from a guess.
5. The five things to check before anyone quotes
Is the floor level? In a period house it usually is not. It changes the plinth and the door gaps.
What is on the wall behind? Sockets, switches and radiator pipes all have to be planned around, or moved before we start.
Where does the room door swing? A bedroom door opening into the wardrobe run decides which end is a dead bay.
Skirting, coving and picture rails. These get scribed around or removed behind the unit — it is a decision, not an afterthought.
How much clear floor is in front? Measure it. That single number settles hinged against sliding.
Every dimension on this page is what we build to, not a regulation. They come from
the sizes real clothes and real rooms need, and we will happily depart from any of them where your room gives us
a reason to. What we will not do is quote from a single width without seeing the wall.
What it costs
Rather than repeat numbers here, our prices are published and kept current on the
carpentry price guide, alongside the rest of our work. If you want to see
finished examples first, the fitted wardrobes page has the styles we build most
often, and alcove storage covers the same treatment applied to the spaces
either side of a chimney breast.