Furniture Buying Guide
The ideal bedroom and living furniture needs to be stylish and practical, looking great in your home and giving you valuable storage space.
Our stunning range of dining tables and chairs, sideboards, display cabinets, wardrobes, bedsteads, headboards and occasional tables offer something for every taste.
How to choose your new furniture
Start by thinking about the look or style you’re after. Our dining & bedroom ranges are available in many types of wood finishes. Where wood, leather and metal is a popular option for bedsteads and headboards.
Wooden furniture
Every piece of wooden furniture is unique, with different characteristics in colour, grain and durability. Cabinets can be made from softwoods such as pine or hardwoods like oak, ash, cherry and teak. There are some woods, such as beech, that don’t fall into either category.
Wooden furniture is affected by temperature and humidity. You should avoid, where possible, placing solid wooden furniture, particularly oak, on under floor heating.
Our furniture experts will be happy to explain the benefits of different woods and finishes, show you how each piece is made and tell you all the pros and cons of solid wood vs veneer.
Foil or Melamine Finish
Foil Finish is a high quality surface layer for 'MDF' (fibre-board). Whereas melamine is used on chipboard - often at the cheaper end of the price range, but is extremely tough and makes better worktops in kitchens, for example, than foil.
Foil is great in living spaces. It is softer to the touch than melamine - which is hard and brittle and it can be produced with a photograph of timber on it, for example, like teak or oak, to 'effect' a look of real wood.
In furniture, doors and drawer fronts are almost always either foil or real timber, as melamine and chipboard together are not good materials for producing the moulded shapes, profiles and mock fielded panels often found on doors.
Higher priced 'top-range' finishes are quite often in chipboard, not MDF; but that is because neither foil or melamine is used as the surface layer but a real wood veneer.
Foil is so called because it is, literally, a foil material, bonded over the MDF (the fibre-board) as an outer-layer.
Metal furniture
For a more contemporary look, we have a stunning range of occasional tables in metal and glass and a choice of leather or fabric chairs.
Also available are a selection of metal bedsteads.
Furniture buying checklist
Before you order, please make sure your furniture will fit your room and can be manoeuvered into your house. Some of our larger cabinets come apart for delivery, so ask us for help if you’re worried. Once your furniture is in production, we can’t accept your cancellation without a charge.
If convenient, visit our store in Exeter to see most of our dining and bedroom ranges, feel the quality, and ask our experts for more information on your favourites.
- Measure carefully!
- Take a closer look