Wardrobe internals: what you'll wish you'd planned

Almost everyone spends their wardrobe budget on the doors. Then they live with the inside. Here is what people tell us they would change, collected from handovers rather than catalogues.

Measure what you own, not what fits

Before anything is drawn, count: how many saris, how many shirts on hangers, how many folded stacks, how many suitcases. A couple who own forty hanging garments and one who own two hundred need different wardrobes, and the second one cannot be rescued by adding shelves later.

The numbers that matter

• Hanging height: about 42 inches for shirts and folded trousers, about 60 for long garments. Two short rails stacked will hold twice what one tall rail does.
• Depth: 22 to 24 inches. Anything shallower and hangers sit at an angle and rub the door.
• Shelf span: keep it under 32 inches unsupported, or it will bow under folded cotton within a year.

Drawers are the thing people add later

And adding them later costs more than including them. Two or three drawers at waist height, inside the wardrobe, handle everything that has no business on an open shelf — underwear, belts, chargers, the jewellery you actually wear.

Nobody has ever told us they put in too many drawers.

The details worth the extra

1. A light inside. A strip on the top rail with a door sensor. In a bedroom with the curtains shut, the difference is absurd for the money.
2. A full-length mirror on the inside of a door — it saves a wall elsewhere in the room.
3. One tall bay for suitcases and the fan you use for four months a year. Otherwise they live on top of the wardrobe collecting dust.
4. A pull-down rail if you are going to the ceiling. Otherwise the top three feet becomes long-term storage you never open.

Sliding or hinged?

Sliding doors save the swing space and suit a narrow room — but you can only ever see half the wardrobe at once, and the bottom track collects dust that has to be vacuumed out. Hinged gives you the whole thing open at once and costs less. Choose sliding when the floor space genuinely forces it, not because it looks neater in a rendering.