Custom Furniture Design in London
Tell Us About Your Home. We’ll Show You What It Could Be.
A Belgravia client came to T&V Architects with a problem that no showroom could solve. Her home had been renovated twice in ten years. Each time, the furniture had been chosen room by room, project by project, from different makers and different periods of her life. The result was a house full of beautiful individual pieces that had never quite become a home. Nothing was wrong. Nothing was right together.
That is the problem custom furniture design in London solves when it is approached architecturally. Not commissioning a single statement piece, but designing furniture as a coherent system — where the timber in the kitchen joinery responds to the timber in the library shelving, where the stone of the bathroom basin was cut from the same block as the kitchen island, where every room speaks the same design language because every piece was conceived within the same architectural vision.
T&V Architects has designed and commissioned bespoke furniture across London for over a decade. From a custom basin carved from stone selected personally by the client, to wardrobes engineered around the precise contents of a wardrobe, to joinery that conceals an entire building’s worth of mechanical and electrical infrastructure without a single visible panel join — our custom furniture design work is where architectural rigour and exceptional craft meet.
The Brief: Translating How You Live Into a Furniture Design
Every custom furniture design project begins with a conversation about how you actually live. Not how you would like to live in theory, but how your household operates day to day. When do you eat? Where do you work from home? How many people need to be in the kitchen at once on a school morning? Do you dress in the bedroom or in a separate dressing room? How much storage do you genuinely need, and what form does it need to take?
T&V Architects invests time in this conversation before a single line is drawn. We have found, consistently, that the most useful information comes not from a client’s wish list but from a careful observation of how they move through their home. A family who entertains frequently needs furniture that reconfigures easily. A client who works from home needs joinery that conceals a full office setup at the end of the working day. A couple with an extensive wardrobe needs storage designed around their actual possessions, not around a standard module.
The brief, properly developed, makes everything that follows faster, more precise, and more likely to produce a result that still feels right ten years from now.
One Design Language: Consistency of Material and Style Across Every Room
The greatest advantage of custom furniture design is not the quality of any individual piece. It is consistency. When every piece of furniture in a home is designed within the same architectural vision — the same material palette, the same proportional logic, the same detailing language — the result is a home that feels completely resolved rather than assembled.
T&V Architects designs custom furniture across entire homes, not room by room. The European oak that appears in the kitchen cabinetry reappears in the library joinery and the bedroom wardrobes. The brass hardware specified for the bathroom vanity is the same brass used throughout the house. The proportional relationship between drawer heights and door panels is consistent from the ground floor to the top. This consistency is invisible in the best way. Visitors cannot always say what makes a T&V Architects home feel so considered. What they feel is that everything belongs — that no piece was chosen in isolation, and that the home has been thought about as a whole. That feeling is the result of a single design language applied with discipline across every room.
Bespoke Wardrobes: Storage Designed Around Exactly What You Own
Standard wardrobe systems are designed around average storage needs. If your needs are average, they work reasonably well. Most people’s needs are not average. A client with a serious shoe collection needs different storage to one whose wardrobe is predominantly suits. A household with young children needs accessible, flexible storage that changes as the children grow. A client who travels frequently for work needs a system that makes packing and unpacking fast and logical.
T&V Architects designs bespoke wardrobes around an audit of exactly what each client owns and how they use it. We count hanging rails and specify their heights. We design drawer depths for folded knitwear, ties, accessories, and shoes respectively. We incorporate pull-out rails, interior lighting, mirror placements, and valet areas where they are genuinely needed, not as standard features added to justify a price point.
The result is wardrobe storage that works better on the first day of use than any standard system ever could — and that continues to work, because it was designed for the person using it.
Sculptural Forms: Curves and Shapes That Only a Maker Can Produce
Straight lines are easy to manufacture. Curves are not. A seamlessly curved kitchen island, a kidney-shaped dressing table, a circular bath surround with a continuous stone lip — these are forms that cannot be produced by a standard manufacturer working from a catalogue. They require a maker with the skill, the equipment, and the patience to work in three dimensions rather than two.
Custom furniture design in London offers access to forms that simply do not exist off the shelf. T&V Architects designs sculptural furniture for clients who want their homes to feel genuinely original — not decorated with unusual purchases, but designed with shapes that have never existed before and will never be reproduced elsewhere. A curved banquette that follows the geometry of a bay window exactly. A freestanding bath carved from a single block of travertine. A reception desk in a private home whose form references the building’s facade. These are the pieces that define a home’s character. They take longer to make and cost more to produce. They are also the pieces that clients never want to leave behind when they move.
Backlit Quartzite: Stone Panels That Bring Light to Kitchen and Bathroom Furniture
One of the most distinctive elements T&V Architects brings to custom furniture design in London is the use of backlit translucent quartzite in kitchen and bathroom joinery. Thin-cut quartzite slabs, illuminated from behind with carefully specified LED panels, produce a quality of light that is unlike anything achievable with conventional materials. The stone glows. Veining that is present but subtle in daylight becomes dramatic after dark. The furniture becomes a light source as well as a surface.
We have used backlit quartzite in kitchen islands where the stone worktop transitions into a lit panel that replaces a conventional splashback. In bathroom vanity units where the basin surround is illuminated from within. In bedroom headboards where the stone panel provides both a material anchor and a soft, ambient light source that eliminates the need for bedside lamps.
The technical requirements are exacting. The stone must be cut to the right thickness — thin enough to transmit light, strong enough to bear use. The LED specification must produce the right colour temperature and be fully dimmable. The joinery must conceal the light source entirely. T&V Architects manages all of this within the furniture design, so the finished result looks effortless.
Hidden Intelligence: Concealing Fan Coils, Manifolds, AV Equipment and Home Automation Within Bespoke Joinery
A fully serviced London home contains a remarkable amount of equipment that nobody wants to see. Fan coil units for heating and cooling. Underfloor heating manifolds. AV racks and media servers. LED light drivers. Home automation controllers. Routers, switches, and patch panels. In a standard fit-out, these live in cupboards that feel like afterthoughts — or worse, in visible enclosures that interrupt the design of a room entirely.
T&V Architects designs bespoke joinery that integrates this equipment as a core part of the furniture design from the start. Fan coil units are concealed within custom-designed cabinetry that provides the required airflow without visible grilles. Underfloor heating manifolds sit behind access panels whose joints are invisible within the joinery pattern. AV equipment is housed in ventilated, acoustically considered enclosures that allow full serviceability without disrupting the room. This is one of the areas where architectural training makes the most practical difference to a client’s daily life. A home where every piece of equipment is properly concealed within considered joinery is a home that feels calm, finished, and entirely in control — regardless of the complexity running behind its walls and within its furniture.
Hand-Picked Stone: Custom Basins and Surfaces Selected at the Yard by You
A basin is one of the most touched objects in a home. You use it every morning and every evening. Its material, its weight, its temperature, the way it sits within the vanity unit around it — these details matter more than almost any other surface in a bathroom. Which is why T&V Architects invites clients to select the stone for their custom basins personally, at the yard, before it is cut.
Stone is not a uniform material. Two slabs of the same quartzite from the same quarry can look entirely different — different veining patterns, different background tones, different degrees of translucency. When a basin is being carved from a single block, the choice of that block determines everything about the finished piece. We take clients to our stone suppliers in person, so they can see the slabs in natural light, hold samples against their intended surroundings, and choose the piece of stone that will become part of their home for the rest of its life.
The same approach applies to kitchen islands, bathroom wall cladding, and any other stone surface within a custom furniture design project. It takes half a day. The results last a lifetime.
Material Collage: Upholstery, Stone and Timber Composed as a Whole
The most considered custom furniture designs combine materials in ways that feel inevitable rather than experimental. Timber joinery with stone inserts. Upholstered panels within a timber frame. Leather drawer fronts set into lacquered cabinetry. Brass inlays in stone floors that echo the brass hardware on the joinery above. These combinations do not happen by accident. They are the result of a material strategy developed at the start of the design process and applied consistently throughout.
T&V Architects develops a material collage for every custom furniture design project in London — a complete specification of every surface, finish, fabric, and hardware element, presented together before anything is ordered. We consider how materials will look together in different light conditions, how they will age relative to one another, and how they will feel under hand and foot.
The result is custom furniture that reads as a composition rather than a collection. Every material present because it contributes something specific, and every combination considered with the care that permanent decisions deserve.
Period Homes, Contemporary Craft: Bespoke Furniture for London’s Heritage Buildings
London’s finest homes are its period properties. Georgian townhouses in Bloomsbury, Victorian terraces in Islington, Edwardian villas in Hampstead — these buildings have architectural characters that are worth preserving and worth responding to. Custom furniture design for these homes requires a particular kind of intelligence: the ability to produce contemporary craft that feels at home within a historical context without resorting to reproduction or pastiche.
T&V Architects has designed bespoke furniture for listed buildings and conservation-area properties across London. We understand the planning constraints, the proportional conventions, and the material traditions of each period. More importantly, we understand how to introduce contemporary furniture into these buildings in a way that honours their character rather than competing with it. A kitchen island in a Kensington townhouse whose proportions reference the room’s original dresser. A bathroom vanity in a Pimlico conversion whose stone and brass speak to the building’s Victorian heritage. A library in a St John’s Wood villa whose joinery aligns with the existing cornicing to the millimetre. These are the details that make custom furniture design in London’s period homes feel resolved rather than imposed.
Living With Time: Pieces That Age Beautifully and Improve With Use
The best argument for custom furniture design is not how it looks on the day it arrives. It is how it looks ten, twenty, thirty years later. Walnut that deepens and warms with age. Leather that softens and develops a patina that no new piece can replicate. Stone that acquires a polish from years of use. Brass hardware that moves from bright to warm gold over time. These are materials that improve with life, rather than showing it as damage.
T&V Architects selects materials for custom furniture design with longevity as a primary criterion. We avoid finishes that cannot be repaired, materials that date quickly, and construction methods that make future restoration difficult. Every piece we commission is designed to be serviceable — upholstery that can be re-covered, timber that can be refinished, stone that can be repolished.
This is custom furniture design as a long-term investment. Not in the financial sense, though the best bespoke pieces do hold their value. In the deeper sense: furniture that becomes part of a home’s history, that carries the marks of a life well lived, and that a client’s children will one day not want to part with.
Custom Furniture Design in London: The T&V Architects Approach
Custom furniture design in London, done well, is indistinguishable from architecture. It occupies space with the same confidence, responds to light with the same intelligence, and ages with the same grace. At T&V Architects, we design furniture because we design buildings — and because we have found, consistently, that the two disciplines cannot be properly separated.
Whether you are commissioning a single bespoke basin for a bathroom in Mayfair or a complete furniture design programme for a townhouse in Chelsea, we bring the same architectural discipline to every piece. The result is custom furniture that feels as though it could not be anywhere else — because it was designed for exactly where it is.
T&V Architects is based at 18 St George’s Drive, London SW1V 4BL. To discuss a custom furniture design project, contact us on +44 (0)20 7931 9620 or book a consultation through our website.