Bespoke Kitchen Units vs Standard Sizes: What’s the Difference and Which Is Right for You?

There’s a question I get asked a lot, usually by homeowners who’ve done a bit of research and are trying to work out whether they actually need made-to-measure kitchen units or whether standard sizes will do the job. It’s a fair question. And the honest answer is: it depends on your room — but more often than not, made-to-order is the smarter choice, and not always for the reasons people expect.

Let me explain the difference properly, because there’s a lot of confusion out there — some of it accidental, some of it deliberately created by companies who’d rather you didn’t think too hard about what you’re buying.

What Are Standard-Size Kitchen Units?

Standard kitchen units — the kind you’ll find at Howdens, Magnet, Wren, IKEA, and most of the high street — come in fixed sizes. The widths are typically 150mm, 300mm, 400mm, 450mm, 500mm, 600mm, 800mm, and 1000mm. Heights are usually fixed at 720mm for base units (to accommodate a standard 870mm worktop height), and depths are typically 560mm for base units and 300mm for wall units.

These sizes exist because they’re efficient to manufacture in volume. They’re not designed around your kitchen. They’re designed around a factory line. That’s not a criticism — it’s just the reality of how mass-market kitchen manufacturing works.

The consequence is that when you fit standard-size units into a room that doesn’t conform to those dimensions — which is most rooms — you end up with gaps. Those gaps get filled with filler panels, end panels, and infill strips. Sometimes that’s fine. Sometimes it looks exactly like what it is: a room that didn’t quite fit the kitchen you bought.

What Are Made-to-Order Kitchen Units?

Made-to-order units are sized to your room. Not approximately to your room — to your room. If your wall is 2,340mm wide and you want four units across it, we work out the sizes that fill that space properly. If you need a base unit that’s 487mm wide to avoid a pipe, we make it 487mm wide. If your ceiling height means you want wall units at 900mm tall rather than the standard 720mm, that’s what you get.

At SJB, every kitchen we supply is made to order. We work directly with our manufacturer to produce units to the exact dimensions you need — custom heights, custom depths, and custom widths as standard. There’s no premium for this. It’s just how we operate.

The units are built rigid — assembled in the factory, not in a flat pack on your kitchen floor. The carcasses are 18mm Egger or Kronospan board throughout, including the backs. That last point matters more than people realise. A lot of flat-pack kitchens use 6mm or 8mm hardboard backs. Ours are 18mm solid board. It makes the unit structurally stronger, it holds fixings properly, and it means the unit doesn’t flex or rack over time.

The Real Differences — Side by Side

Let me be direct about what you’re actually comparing when you look at standard versus made-to-order:

Fit and Finish

Standard units will leave gaps in most rooms. Those gaps need filling, and how well that’s done depends on the skill of the fitter and the quality of the filler panels available. In a perfectly square, perfectly standard-dimensioned kitchen, standard units can look great. In the real world — where walls aren’t always straight, where alcoves exist, where the room is 2,340mm wide instead of 2,400mm — made-to-order gives you a cleaner result with less reliance on filler panels to hide the awkward bits.

Construction Quality

This is where the gap between mass-market flat-pack and made-to-order rigid units is most significant. A rigid unit arrives assembled. The joints are tight, the structure is solid, and the unit is square before it goes anywhere near your kitchen. A flat-pack unit is only as good as the person who assembled it — and cam-and-dowel joints, while adequate, are not as strong as a factory-assembled rigid carcass.

The carcass material matters too. Our units use 18mm Egger or Kronospan board — both are premium, industry-standard materials used by quality kitchen manufacturers across Europe. They’re dimensionally stable, they hold fixings properly, and they don’t swell or warp with moisture the way cheaper board materials can. If you’ve ever seen a kitchen where the drawer boxes have started to sag or the hinges have pulled out of the carcass wall, cheap board is usually the culprit.

Drawer Boxes

We fit Blum Antaro drawer boxes as standard. Blum is the benchmark for kitchen hardware — the brand that serious kitchen fitters specify when they want something that will still work perfectly in fifteen years. The Antaro system uses a steel-sided drawer box with Blum’s BLUMOTION soft-close mechanism built in. It’s smooth, it’s quiet, and it doesn’t require adjustment every year.

If you want to go further, we also offer dovetail solid oak drawer boxes as a premium upgrade. These are the kind of drawer boxes you’d expect to find in a kitchen costing three times the price. They look exceptional, they’re built to last, and they’re available from us without the showroom markup.

Blum soft close is standard across all our units — not an optional extra, not something you pay more for. Hinges, drawer runners, all of it. It’s the way kitchens should be built.

What About the Cost?

Here’s where things get interesting. The assumption is that made-to-order, rigid-built, premium-spec kitchen units must cost significantly more than standard flat-pack. In some parts of the market, that’s true. If you’re buying from a showroom — Magnet, Wren, Fineline — you’re paying for the showroom, the design consultant, the commission structure, and the marketing budget before you get anywhere near the cost of the actual units.

Because we supply direct — working directly with our manufacturer and cutting out the retail layer entirely — our pricing is typically 30 to 50 per cent lower than Howdens for comparable specification. That’s not a vague claim. That’s what our customers tell us when they’ve priced the same kitchen at both places.

To give you a rough sense of what that means in practice: a well-specified supply-only kitchen for a typical three-bedroom house — 10 to 15 units, rigid construction, Egger or Kronospan carcasses, Blum hardware throughout — will generally come in somewhere between £1,500 and £3,500 depending on the door style and finish. That’s the kitchen units and doors, supply only. Worktops, fitting, and associated trades are separate.

We deliver nationwide, from as little as 10 working days from order. If you’re in Greater Manchester — Oldham, Stockport, Bury, Bolton, Rochdale, Tameside — you can also visit our showroom and see the quality in person before you commit to anything.

Who Should Choose Made-to-Order?

Honestly? Most people. The exceptions are narrow: if your kitchen is a perfectly standard layout with no awkward dimensions, if you’re on a very tight budget and standard flat-pack is genuinely all you can stretch to, or if you need units immediately and can’t wait for a lead time. In those cases, standard units from a decent supplier are a perfectly reasonable choice.

But if your room has any unusual dimensions — and most do — if you care about the quality of what you’re buying, if you want drawer boxes that will still work properly in a decade, and if you want a kitchen that looks like it was designed for your room rather than adapted to fit it, made-to-order is the right answer. And with pricing that’s 30 to 50 per cent below the showroom alternatives, the cost argument for standard units is weaker than most people think.

A Word on Vinyl Doors

While we’re on the subject of what to look for when buying kitchen units, I want to say something about vinyl-wrapped doors, because they come up a lot in this conversation. Vinyl doors — where a thin plastic film is applied over an MDF substrate — are common in the budget end of the market and are often presented as a perfectly reasonable option. They’re not, in my view, and it’s one of the reasons we don’t supply them.

The vinyl lifts. It starts at the edges and corners, usually within a few years in a normal kitchen environment, and once it starts there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t repair a peeling vinyl door. You replace it, or you live with it. For a kitchen that’s supposed to last ten to fifteen years, that’s not an acceptable outcome. If budget is a concern, a foil shaker door on a quality substrate is a far better choice — it looks good, it lasts, and it won’t let you down.

How to Get a Quote

If you’re at the stage of comparing options and want to know what a made-to-order kitchen from SJB would actually cost for your room, the quickest way is to get in touch directly. You don’t need a full set of drawings — a rough room plan with dimensions is enough to get a ballpark figure.

You can contact us here, call us on 0161 509 4221, or if you’re in the Greater Manchester area, come and visit the showroom in Oldham and see the quality for yourself. We’re open Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 4:30pm.

If you’re a builder, developer, or kitchen fitter looking to open a trade account, head to the trade account page — we work with trade customers across the UK and the pricing reflects that.

Made-to-order doesn’t have to mean expensive. It just means built properly, sized correctly, and supplied by someone who knows what they’re doing. That’s what we do.