Journal · Bedrooms
Nineteen per cent, or fifty-five
Which? asked 1,544 people whose fitted bedroom furniture was five to ten years old whether it showed damage or wear. On average 38% said yes. Between brands the figure ran from 19% to 55% — and the spread is the useful part.
Most reviews of fitted bedroom furniture tell you how it looked on the day it went in. Which? asked a better question. In August and September 2025 it surveyed 2,796 people about fitted wardrobes and bedroom furniture bought since 2015, and it asked the 1,544 whose furniture was already five to ten years old whether it showed any damage or wear. On average, 38% said it did.
That average is not the interesting number. The range behind it is: across brands, the figure ran from 19% to 55%. Nearly three times the failure rate between the best-performing name and the worst, for a product almost everyone buys once.
The headline numbers
owners surveyed, August–September 2025
showed damage or wear at five to ten years
had needed repairs
customer score for independent firms, against 77% for the top brand
It is the drawers and the finish
Which? names the two most common failures, and neither is structural. They are damage to the wardrobe's finish or surface, and drawers not opening smoothly, or at all. A separate 31% said their furniture had required repairs at some point.
Read that from the workshop floor and it is a fairly precise description of where money gets saved. A finish fails at the edges first — the visible long edge of a door, the lip of a drawer front — which is a question about what the board is faced and edged with, and whether the edge is a lacquered solid lipping or a strip of tape pressed on with hot glue. Drawers stop running when the runner was specified to a price: a side-mounted roller behaves very differently at year eight to a concealed undermount with a proper load rating and a soft-close damper. Neither difference is visible in a showroom, and neither is something you can put right later without taking the drawer box apart.
What owners reported going wrong
Share of respondents, Which? fitted bedroom furniture survey, fieldwork August–September 2025
| Damage or wear | 38% | |
|---|---|---|
| Needed repairs | 31% | |
| Installation problems | 20% | |
| Delivery problems | 17% |
Each bar is a share of a different sub-sample of the same survey: damage and repairs come from the 1,544 owners whose furniture was five to ten years old; installation from 1,157 and delivery from 1,477 owners who bought within the past three years. These are not four slices of one group and they do not total anything. Averages across brands; brand-level figures are behind Which?'s paywall.
The fit is half the product
Only 20% of owners had problems with installation, which sounds reassuring until you read the next line: for one brand, 48% of customers reported installation problems. Which? does not name it outside its members' area. The most common single complaint was the installation taking longer than planned (9%), and most fits were finished inside a week.
Delivery ran better than the trade's reputation would suggest — 86% waited under two months, and 17% hit a problem, most often the date being rescheduled (5%), parts arriving damaged (5%) or parts missing altogether (4%). Those three are the same failure wearing different hats: furniture made somewhere else, shipped in, and fitted by someone who did not build it.
A wardrobe does not fail at the carcass. It fails at the edge of the door and the runner under the drawer — the two places a price is easiest to cut and hardest to see.
What we'd take from it
One finding needs declaring before we use it: Which? also surveyed people who bought from independent companies, and gave them an averaged customer score of 87%, against 77% for the highest-scoring national brand, with five stars for build quality, quality of finish, durability and value for money. NG Bespoke is an independent maker. That result flatters us, so treat it with the caution it deserves — it is an average across every independent in a sample of 535, not a score any one company earned, and Which? says plainly that it does not reflect the performance of any individual firm. It tells you the category tends to do well. It tells you nothing about the firm quoting for your bedroom.
What is portable is the list of questions the data implies. Ask what the carcass and door are made from, and how the exposed edges are finished. Ask the load rating and the make of the drawer runners, and whether they are undermount. Ask who fits it — the company's own installers or a subcontractor booked for the week. Ask what the guarantee actually covers and for how long: Which? notes Sharps offers 15 years against Hammonds' 10, and a guarantee length is one of the few durability signals a maker will commit to in writing before you buy.
And one honest caveat about the survey itself. It is self-reported, it covers purchases going back to 2015, and "signs of damage or wear" is a judgement each owner made for themselves — one person's scuff is another's write-off. It cannot tell you a given wardrobe will last. What it can tell you is that between the best and worst names on a high street shortlist, the odds of it looking tired before your first decade is out differ by a factor of nearly three. That is worth ten minutes of questions at the quotation stage.