Services

Bespoke kitchens, made for the room.

A kitchen drawn from a measured survey of your room, built in a workshop and fitted by the team working to that survey. Design, cabinetry, worktops and finish — and the room prepared for it first, if you want that too.

A bespoke kitchen is one made for a specific room rather than sold into it. The layout, the storage, the worktop and the way the doors are built are all decided from a measured survey instead of picked off a range, and Tom carries the job from that survey through to the last cabinet fitted, working with the same team throughout. That covers a lot of ground — design, construction, finish, stone — and the doors are one part of it, not the whole of it.

Tom Tennant works from Washington, under the South Downs, and builds kitchens across West Sussex.

Who actually does the work?

Tom measures the room and draws it. It is built and fitted by the same team he has worked with for years, to his numbers — no drawing handed to a different firm to price, no fitting crew arriving who have never seen the room, and no call centre between you and whoever is on the tools. When a wall turns out worse than the survey suggested, the person cutting the timber is working from the survey that found it, and can change the plan there and then.

The kitchen fitters are that same team, working to a survey Tom took himself rather than to one handed over on paper.

You are living in the house while the work happens. The job is run accordingly.

A painted in-frame kitchen part way through fitting, with the run of base cabinets levelled and clamped, the worktop not yet on, and the wall behind still bare plaster. — Part way through, before the worktop goes on

Why not a showroom kitchen?

A showroom kitchen is built to a catalogue of cabinet widths, because that is what a factory can produce economically and a fitting team can install in a week. A run is chosen from those widths and whatever is left over at each end is covered with a filler panel. That works well enough in a square room built after the war.

It works less well in a house where a wall is out of plumb by fifteen millimetres along a run, or a chimney breast eats forty millimetres out of a cabinet on one side and nothing on the other. Those are not faults in the house. They are what a couple of hundred years, or a couple of decades of settlement, does to a wall.

A bespoke kitchen starts from the room instead of the catalogue. Cabinets are sized to the dimensions actually measured, a run is set out to close on a wall that has moved, and a filler panel is the exception rather than the plan.

Not every kitchen on this site is one of ours, and that is worth saying plainly. Supplied ranges get fitted too. The kitchen at Storrington was designed and supplied by Howdens and fitted by this business, into a room with a piece of structural oak standing in the middle of it and a riven flagstone floor that is not level — and a supplied range still has to be made to fit a room like that. Everything that reconciles a square cabinet with a crooked building happens on site, whoever made the cabinet. If you have already chosen a kitchen, it can be fitted properly. If you have not, it can be made for the room instead.

What happens before anything is cut

There are two site visits before a single cabinet is made, and the second one exists so that nothing is built to a design you have not seen twice.

The first visit is the survey and the conversation together. The room is measured corner to corner and across the diagonals, with levels taken along the floor and up the walls, so the kitchen design starts from what is there rather than what the plan says should be. Alongside that: what you want from the room. Where the light comes from, which way the doors swing, what has to be reachable and what can go high, and whether you are cooking in it or living in it or both.

The quotation follows that visit, in writing, against a stated scope. The figure does not move unless the scope does — and if the design changes at the second visit, that change is priced before anything goes into production.

The second visit happens only if you want to go ahead, and its whole job is to finalise the design. It is a site visit rather than a phone call, so the design is settled in the room it is for.

Production starts when you are completely happy with the design and not before. Nothing is cut until then.

Fitting is the last stage, when the kitchen is ready and we come and install it.

That sequence is the same whether the kitchen is one we have made for the room or a supplied range we are fitting. Timing is confirmed at the survey rather than promised before it.

How the doors are built

An in-frame kitchen is one where each cabinet carries a solid timber frame across its front, and the door sits inside that frame rather than over it — on hinges let into the wood, with a shadow gap of two or three millimetres running the whole way round.

Most kitchens fitted from a shelf do the opposite: the door hangs on the front edge of the box, sits proud of it, and covers the joint.

	In-frame	Door-on-front
Door position	Inside a timber face frame	Over the front of the box
What you see	A shadow gap on all four sides	Doors nearly touching
Tolerance	Frame must be true and stay true	Misalignment can be adjusted out
Build time	Longer — the frame is furniture in itself	Shorter

That gap is the part that matters. It is the first thing you see standing in the doorway, and it has to stay even — top and bottom of a door that may be a metre tall — after the house has been through another ten winters. A door hung on the front of a box can be adjusted to hide a carcass slightly out of square. A door inside a frame has nowhere to hide.

It is slower to build for exactly that reason. It is also what decides whether a door is still closing evenly in ten or twenty years, rather than dropping as the hinges wear and the screws work loose in sheet material never meant to carry them that long. That is a property of how the door is hung, not a promise about any particular kitchen — this business was founded in 2020 and cannot yet have watched one of its own for a decade.

Will it fit a house that has moved?

A run meets a wall that is not flat and not plumb. The cabinet is square, because it has to be, so the difference is taken up in a scribe: a piece cut to follow the wall exactly, shaved back in passes until the joint closes along its whole length.

Done properly there is no gap and no bead of filler pretending to be one. In a period house this is most of the fitting time, and it is the reason the survey measures the diagonals rather than trusting the corners.

An in-frame sink run under a leaded casement: painted doors set inside their frames with a shadow gap round each one, a double butler sink, and a light speckled stone worktop with drainer grooves cut into it. — The shadow gap, running the whole way round each door

Getting the room ready first

A new kitchen usually arrives into a room that is not ready for it, and the gap between “the old kitchen is out” and “the new one can go in” is where a job stalls if nobody owns it.

We can take that whole stage on rather than leaving you to line up four trades around a delivery date:

Removing the existing kitchen
Electrics and plumbing, moved to suit the new layout
Plastering, once the walls behind the old units are exposed and it is obvious what they need
Painting and decorating
New flooring

Two of those are worth pulling out. Where the services go decides how free the kitchen design is: settle it early and the sockets, the waste and the extraction can go where the drawing wants them rather than the drawing bending to where they already are. And a floor laid as part of the same job can be set out across the whole of it — the kitchen at Worthing has a herringbone floor running through the room and out through a new doorway into the hall, which only reads that way because one trade set it out across both.

None of this is compulsory. If you have your own electrician, plasterer or floor layer, the kitchen is fitted around them. It is offered because it is the same renovation work this business does anyway, and because handing over one room and getting it back finished is one set of dates to keep track of instead of five.

A sage green shaker kitchen in an L round two walls, with a white worktop, open oak shelves between the wall cabinets, and a herringbone floor running through the room. — Worthing: the room finished, floor included

Islands and stone worktops

An island has to work as a walkway before it works as a worktop. Where it sits is decided by the routes people actually take through the room — to the sink, to the back door, past whoever is cooking — not by centring it on the floor plan.

Stone is templated after the cabinets are in and levelled, never before, because a template taken from a drawing will not match what the room turns out to be.

Storage: larders and tall runs

A tall run is a piece of furniture standing against a wall that is neither flat nor plumb, so it is scribed in the same way a base run is, and it carries more weight while doing it.

Larders earn their space by being fitted out for what actually goes in them rather than given a standard set of shelves: jars at eye level, boards on edge, the appliances that live on a worktop everywhere else.

Paint and finish

Cabinetry is built from timber and sheet materials chosen for what each part has to do, then painted. Colour is decided against the light in the room rather than from a chart under a showroom spotlight, because the same grey reads warm in a south-facing kitchen and cold in a north-facing one.

A large painted in-frame kitchen: an island under three brass pendants, a leaded casement over the sink run behind, a tall bank of cabinetry to the right and an arched plastered recess with shelves to the left. — The island, set out as a walkway first

Work of this kind

Kitchens made for the room

A sage green shaker kitchen in an L round two walls, with a white worktop, chrome bar handles, open oak shelves between the wall cabinets, a chimney extractor over an induction hob and a herringbone floor running through.

Kitchen and oak doors, Worthing

Worthing

A sage green shaker kitchen in Worthing, designed and fitted by Tennant, with a new doorway formed into the room and oak glazed doors hung through the rest of the house.

A large kitchen looking down the length of a navy island with its carcass open and no worktop on it: warm grey shaker units and full-height cabinets down both walls, brass handles, double ovens to the left, and a doorway at the far end through to a smaller kitchen.

Kitchen and island, Colgate

Colgate

A kitchen in Colgate with a navy island down the middle of it, designed and fitted in warm grey shaker units and photographed at handover with every worktop still to come.

A kitchen fitted on three walls in warm grey shaker doors with brass handles: a pale veined worktop turning two corners, an apron-front ceramic sink centred under a black-framed window, and a black induction hob beneath a black chimney extractor.

Fitted kitchen, Colgate

Colgate

A kitchen designed and fitted in Colgate in warm grey shaker doors with brass handles, set out from an apron-front sink centred on the window, its cabinet cut to suit.

A modern white kitchen fitted into a corner: gloss slab doors with bar handles, solid oak worktops mitred at the corner and returned under the window to a sink, a gas hob under a chimney extractor, and a tall double oven housing.

Modern kitchen, Haywards Heath

Haywards Heath

A modern kitchen in Haywards Heath, designed and fitted by Tennant, with solid oak worktops mitred round a corner and scribed into the window reveal.

The finished kitchen run: pale hand-painted in-frame cabinets under a white quartz worktop, a deep butler sink beneath the window, and dark teal walls with the old timber posts and beams left exposed.

Kitchen and utility room, Pulborough

Pulborough

A kitchen and utility room designed and built on site — every unit and door made by hand in the room, the quartz worktop machine-cut in place, and the whole thing hand painted.

A large painted in-frame kitchen: an island under three brass pendants with two bar stools at it, a leaded casement window over the sink run behind, a tall bank of cabinetry holding black ovens to the right, and an arched plastered recess with shelves to the left.

In-frame kitchen with a range mantel, Bolney

Bolney

A painted in-frame kitchen taken part by part: a range under a mantel, a double butler sink with drainer grooves cut into the stone, a tall bank panelled on its end, a glazed dresser and a utility run with a bench.

Kitchen island with dark painted in-frame doors and a pale veined worktop that returns to the floor at one end, standing on flagstones beneath an exposed oak beam and the post that carries it.

In-frame kitchen, Storrington

Storrington

An in-frame kitchen supplied and designed by Howdens, fitted by Tennant into a period room with an oak post standing in it and a riven flagstone floor.