Handmade kitchens in Crawley

Crawley is unusual in West Sussex because so much of it was planned. The neighbourhood structure — Pound Hill, Three Bridges, Ifield, Southgate, Tilgate, Langley Green, Furnace Green — produced large numbers of well-built post-war houses with well-organised, sensibly sized kitchens.

The kitchens themselves, though, are usually long past it. A lot of Crawley houses are on their second or third kitchen, each one a slightly better grade of flat-pack than the last, and each one built to standard cabinet widths in rooms that were never quite standard.

What made-to-measure does here is different from what it does in a Georgian townhouse. It is less about coping with crooked walls and more about reclaiming the twenty or thirty centimetres lost to filler panels, running cabinetry to the ceiling instead of stopping at a dust shelf, and building storage that suits a family rather than a showroom. On a typical Crawley kitchen that can be the difference between six usable cupboards and eight.

There is older stock too: Three Bridges and the original Crawley High Street have genuine Victorian and older buildings, some of them timber-framed, which need the full period treatment.

Crawley is around fifty minutes up the A23 from the workshop, which is comfortably workable — surveys, fitting and painting are all scheduled as full days rather than squeezed visits.