Why bespoke kitchen quotes vary so widely
Two quotes for the same room can differ by a factor of three, and it is rarely because one joiner is greedy. A bespoke kitchen is a set of decisions: carcass material, door construction, drawer runners, worktop, ironmongery, paint system and how much of the work happens in a workshop rather than on site. Change four of those and you change the price band entirely.
The useful question is not "how much is a bespoke kitchen" but "what am I buying at each level". Once you can read a quote line by line, comparing suppliers becomes straightforward and you stop paying for things you did not ask for.
Indicative budget bands
The figures below are indicative ranges for London projects and are meant for early budgeting only; every room is measured and priced individually. They cover cabinetry, spraying and installation, and exclude appliances, plumbing, electrics, flooring and building works.
A modest galley or single-run kitchen in a flat generally sits at the lower end. A large open-plan kitchen with an island, a pantry, integrated seating and a utility usually sits at the top.
- Entry bespoke: roughly £18,000-£30,000 - painted MDF doors, laminate or quartz worktop, standard soft-close runners.
- Mid bespoke: roughly £30,000-£55,000 - solid timber frames, hand-painted finish, stone worktop, better ironmongery, one or two special items such as a dresser or pantry.
- High bespoke: £55,000 upwards - veneered or solid hardwood, curved or panelled joinery, integrated lighting, specialist finishes, island and utility as a matched set.
How the money splits
On a typical project the cabinetry itself is around half the joinery budget, finishing is fifteen to twenty per cent, worktops ten to twenty per cent, ironmongery and internal fittings five to ten per cent, and installation the balance. Appliances sit outside all of that and can easily add £8,000-£25,000 depending on brand.
Understanding the split matters because savings are only available where there is real money. Downgrading handles on a £40,000 kitchen saves a few hundred pounds. Changing a painted solid-timber door for a sprayed MDF door of the same profile saves thousands and, once finished, most people cannot tell the difference by eye.
The decisions that move the price most
Door construction is the single biggest lever. In-frame doors, where each door sits inside a face frame, take far more labour to fit and adjust than lay-on doors and typically add twenty to thirty per cent to the cabinetry cost. Shaker lay-on doors give a similar visual language for considerably less.
After that: worktop material, whether you need curves or non-standard heights, how many internal fittings you specify, and how difficult access is. A fourth-floor mansion flat with no lift and a shared stairwell genuinely costs more to install than a ground-floor house, and honest quotes say so.
Costs people forget to budget for
Making good is the usual surprise. Old London kitchens hide out-of-square walls, redundant pipework, dead sockets and floors that fall away by twenty millimetres across a run. Scribing joinery into that is normal work, but moving services, replastering and levelling floors are separate trades with separate costs.
Also budget for extraction routing, socket and switch repositioning, a temporary kitchen if you are living in, waste removal, and the paint that will need touching in after other trades finish. A sensible contingency is ten per cent of the total project, not of the joinery alone.
Where it is worth spending more
Spend on the parts you touch and the parts that carry weight. Good drawer runners and hinges are used tens of thousands of times over a kitchen's life and are cheap relative to replacing a failed drawer box. A properly built carcass with an eighteen millimetre back and glued, dowelled joints stays square when a stone worktop lands on it.
Spend on the finish, too. A well-prepared, sprayed and lacquered painted surface survives steam, spills and cleaning; a thin brush-applied coat over unsealed MDF will chip at the arrises within a year and looks tired long before the cabinets are worn out.
Where you can sensibly save
Keep the plumbing where it is if the layout allows. Moving a sink and waste across a room in a period property can cost more than a run of cabinetry. Keep appliance sizes standard rather than specifying an oversized cooker that forces bespoke widths everywhere around it.
Simplify the door profile, use one worktop material rather than three, and reserve the showpiece detailing for the pieces people actually look at: the island, the pantry, the dresser wall. Repeating a plain, well-made run elsewhere is not a compromise, it is how good kitchens have always been built.
Getting a quote you can compare
Ask every supplier to price the same specification and to break out cabinetry, finish, worktop, ironmongery, appliances and installation as separate lines. Ask what is excluded, what the payment stages are, and how long the lead time runs from sign-off of drawings rather than from deposit.
A real bespoke maker will survey the room before committing to a fixed price, and will tell you which parts of your brief are expensive for little gain. If a quote arrives with no survey and no drawings, treat the number as a guess.
Frequently asked questions
- Is a bespoke kitchen worth it compared with a fitted range kitchen?
- In older London properties, usually yes. Range kitchens are built to fixed module widths, so awkward walls, chimney breasts and low ceilings leave filler panels and dead space. Bespoke cabinetry uses the whole room, matches existing mouldings and can be repaired rather than replaced.
- How long does a bespoke kitchen take?
- Allow two to four weeks for design and survey, six to ten weeks for making, and one to two weeks on site for a typical kitchen, longer where stone templating and specialist finishes are involved.
- Can you work alongside my architect or main contractor?
- Yes. We are used to working to architects' drawings and to fitting our programme around other trades, including agreeing service positions before first fix.
Planning a project like this?
SH Joinery surveys every room before quoting, so you get a fixed price against a written specification rather than an estimate. Send us your drawings, photographs or rough sizes and we will come back with an honest view of what your project involves.