The wardrobe is the piece of furniture you use more than any other and think about least. Get the inside right and getting dressed stops being an obstacle course. Get it wrong and you have a very expensive wall of doors with a pile of shoes at the bottom.
This is a practical guide to how built-in wardrobes are actually laid out in South African bedrooms — the six configurations that cover almost every room, what each costs in 2026, and the internal dimensions that decide whether the thing works.
Six layouts that cover almost every bedroom
1. The single wall run
The default: one continuous run of cupboards along the wall opposite or beside the bed, floor to ceiling. Simple, efficient, and the best value per metre because there are no corners to engineer. Typically 2 to 4 metres wide in a main bedroom, 1.5 to 2.5 metres in a secondary room.
2. The corner or L-shape
Two runs meeting in a corner, used where one wall isn't long enough. It adds capacity but the corner itself is the difficult part — without a corner unit or a rotating fitting, roughly 600mm of that space is close to unreachable. Worth doing, worth designing properly.
3. The sliding-door wall
Two or three large panels running on a track. The whole point is that nothing swings into the room, which makes this the answer in bedrooms where a hinged door would hit the bed. The trade-off is that you can only ever see two-thirds of the wardrobe at once, and the track steals about 100mm of internal depth.
4. The walk-in dressing room
A separate small room, or a partitioned section of a large bedroom, fitted on two or three walls with open hanging, shelving, drawer banks and often an island. Common in Sandton, Fourways and Waterfall estate homes. It needs about 2m of clear width to work — below that you cannot stand between two runs comfortably.
5. The over-bed bridge
Tall units either side of the bed connected by a bridging cupboard above the headboard. Excellent use of dead space in small rooms and apartments, and it frames the bed neatly. Needs care with headboard height and bedside lighting so it doesn't feel low.
6. The passage and linen cupboard
Not glamorous, and quietly one of the most useful things you can add to a South African house. A shallow 400–600mm run of shelving in a passage takes linen, towels, cleaning supplies and luggage out of the bedrooms entirely. Cheap per metre because there is no hanging and no deep carcass.
What each type costs in 2026
| Wardrobe type | Typical installed price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Single small cupboard (1–2m, hinged) | R9,400 – R17,500 | Standard internals, one hanging rail, shelving above |
| Full bedroom wall (2–4m, hinged) | R17,500 – R53,000 | The most common main-bedroom specification |
| Sliding-door wardrobe | R21,000 – R64,500 | Aluminium track systems, mirror or glass panel options |
| Walk-in dressing room | R41,000 – R140,000+ | Multi-wall, island drawers, glass shelving, lighting |
| Passage / linen cupboard | R7,000 – R17,500 | Shallow depth, shelving configuration dependent |
Prices shown are estimates and starting points, not fixed quotations. The final price depends on the scope, complexity and specific requirements of each job — the size of the space, the finish and hardware you choose, the internal fittings, site conditions and access.
A firm, itemised quotation is provided free of charge once we have measured and assessed your requirements. Request a free quote and we will give you an exact figure, usually within one business day.
Installed 2026 ranges for Gauteng. Per-metre rates by finish are in our built-in cupboard price guide — melamine from R2,950/m through to sprayed duco at R8,200–R14,000+/m.
Getting the inside right
This is where wardrobes succeed or fail, and it is the part most people spend the least time on. Some numbers worth knowing before you approve a drawing:
- Depth: 600mm. A clothes hanger is about 450–500mm across. At 550mm internal depth clothing rubs the back and the door. 600mm external is the working standard for hanging. Anything shallower should be shelving, not hanging.
- Long hang: 1,600–1,800mm. Enough for dresses and long coats. You usually need only one section of it.
- Short hang: 1,000–1,100mm. Shirts, jackets, folded trousers. Two short-hang sections stacked fit in the height of one long hang, which roughly doubles your hanging capacity — the single most effective change you can make to most wardrobe designs.
- Drawers inside, not outside. Drawer banks behind the doors keep the bedroom facade clean and are cheaper than external drawer fronts.
- Shoes need 200–350mm shelves. Angled or flat, but dedicated. Shoes at the bottom of a hanging section is how the bottom of a hanging section becomes unusable.
- Top boxes for the top metre. The space above 2m is only genuinely useful with a separate section for suitcases and seasonal storage.
Spend an evening counting what you own — roughly how many long items, how many short, how many folded, how many pairs of shoes — and bring that to the design meeting. It changes the layout more than any style decision will.
Hinged or sliding?
| Hinged | Sliding | |
|---|---|---|
| Room needed in front | 500–600mm swing | None |
| Access | Full wardrobe visible at once | Only two-thirds visible at a time |
| Internal depth lost | None | ~100mm to the track |
| Cost | Lower | Higher — track system and larger panels |
| Best for | Rooms with clear floor space | Narrow rooms; bed close to the wardrobe |
The practical rule: measure from the wardrobe wall to the nearest obstacle. Under about 700mm, go sliding. Over it, hinged doors give better daily access for less money.
Mirrored sliding panels do two jobs at once — they remove the need for a separate mirror and make a small bedroom feel significantly larger. They also show every fingerprint, so they suit adult bedrooms better than children's rooms.
Rooms that don't cooperate
Custom cabinetry exists mainly because South African bedrooms are rarely rectangles with straight walls. The common problems and what to do about them:
- Sloped or raked ceilings. Common in loft conversions and cottage roofs. Build the carcass to the slope, put hanging where the height allows and drawers or shoe shelving under the low end.
- A window or door in the run. Bridge over it with a shallow cupboard and put tall units either side, rather than stopping the run and losing the wall.
- Walls out of square. Almost universal in older homes. This is exactly what scribing is for — the carcass is built true and the face panel is cut to follow the wall, so there is no visible gap.
- Under a staircase. A stepped run of doors following the stair line turns genuinely dead space into the best storage in the house.
- Bulkheads and beams. Design around them deliberately, with the cupboard line meeting the bulkhead cleanly, rather than leaving a 200mm gap that collects dust for a decade.
Built-in wardrobe FAQs
A full bedroom wall of built-in wardrobes typically costs R17,500 to R53,000 installed in 2026, depending on width, finish and internals. Smaller single cupboards run R9,400 to R17,500, sliding-door systems R21,000 to R64,500, and walk-in dressing rooms from about R41,000 upward. Per linear metre, expect R2,950 for standard melamine through to R14,000+ for sprayed finishes.
600mm external depth is the working standard for hanging clothes, because a hanger is about 450–500mm wide and needs clearance from both the back panel and the door. Sliding doors take roughly 100mm for the track, so a sliding wardrobe should be built slightly deeper. Anything under about 550mm is better used as shelving than hanging space.
Hinged doors cost less, lose no internal depth and show the whole wardrobe at once, but need 500–600mm of clear swing space in front. Sliding doors need none, which makes them the answer in narrow rooms or where a bed sits close to the wardrobe, at the cost of only ever seeing two-thirds of the interior.
Replace a single long-hang rail with two stacked short-hang sections wherever you don't need full-length space — that roughly doubles hanging capacity in the same width. Then build to the ceiling with a separate top-box section for luggage and seasonal items, and give shoes dedicated 200–350mm shelves instead of the floor.
Typically two to four weeks to manufacture after the design is approved, then one to two days to install for a standard bedroom wall. Walk-in dressing rooms and sliding systems take longer on site. Measurement and design usually add another week before manufacturing starts.
Yes — this is one of the clearest cases for custom rather than ready-made. The carcass is built to follow the roof line, with hanging placed where the height allows and drawers or shoe storage under the low end. The result uses space that a standard-height unit simply cannot reach.
Design yours properly
We measure your room, talk through what you actually own and how you get dressed, then draw a layout before anything is cut. Design, manufacture and installation are all done by us, so the drawing you approve is the wardrobe you get.
See our built-in wardrobes service and bedroom cupboards, browse finished wardrobes, or check local pages for Johannesburg, Sandton, Pretoria and Centurion.
