Our original intention when buying ours was that it would be aspirational. When closed, it would sit calmly in the corner; a rectangle of nothing, doors shut, neat piles of colour coordinated clothing inside, folded to perfection like a catalogue page. That didn’t really last longer than nine days. In reality, what happens in every house with one of ours is that the doors stay permanently open because somebody is inevitably halfway through deciding what to wear at any given moment and what should be a calm rectangle is instead a white rectangle with a jumper draped over one corner like it’s resigned itself to defeat.
That’s the point where us owners diverge and it isn’t actually the wardrobe itself that does it, nobody dislikes how theirs looks, it’s about what actually constitutes “using” your wardrobe. Half of us insist that theirs earns its keep multiple times a day; doors being opened and closed at least a dozen times before half nine in the morning, yours true workhorse. The other half owns one that functions at this point more as decor than anything else, three overloaded drawers and every other one containing approximately twelve coats hangers and a hot water bottle you swore you didn’t buy.
We have both of these, apparently successfully, which is more telling about us than it is about the wardrobes.
The one thing we will all agree on however is the whiteness of it.
It will highlight your sins.
Place a bag down without thinking and you’ve got a scuff. Run past with wet hands with anything vaguely felt tipped and you have a Tuesday you’ll never forget. One of ours has a weird imprint on the side panel from who knows what that’s been sat mocking us with for four years now. We’ve resigned ourselves to calling it “character”.
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Anyway, despite that we do actually genuinely like ours. Properly. Not in the love something because you paid a lot of money for it way. White has a magical effect in a bedroom that no other colour does. It allows what is essentially a big flat piece of furniture to recede into the background rather than shouting about itself, and believe me it matters when the room is on the smaller side and the wardrobe most definitely is not.
Get good hinges on it, stay away from the ones that look like they’ll fall off at the sneeze test, we’ve all learned this lesson with our first one and will forever keep learning it via very cheap shoulder surgeries as the door comes away in your hands at 3am.
The main thing people don’t tell you about is the white wardrobe fantasy vs white wardrobe reality gap.
You imagine how neat the drawer full of folded jumpers will be.
You end up with a bottom drawer that gets used as everyone’s catchall for odd socks/toys/pencils/noisy sweets within about three weeks of buying it. It’s not planned. It simply exists, in every house across the world, as a law of physics.
The day to day relationship most of us have with ours is: they look amazing closed, a borderline health hazard open and how much you “use” it versus just shove things in at bodgment level varies wildly depending on who you ask and how recently they’ve spent an hour rearranging it. Would buy again? Yes. Every time? Probably not. Just don’t go into it expecting the perfectly organised version you have hiding in your head to survive real life and your family.
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