Made in heaven | Made.com review – designer furniture straight from the manufacturers

Gold filing cabinet – the lesser known Bond movie

We’ve been so preoccupied with our blog of late that our poor little house has been neglected, and you should see the state of the garden. Sure our home is tidy(ish) and clean but it needed a little TLC and a refresh (as they call it in publishers talk). As we both work in the magazine industry, we love flicking through glossy homes titles to get some inspiration. The down side – well, the cost of what we want is way out of our budget. Cool designer furniture comes with not so cool price tags.

We usually wait till the Habitat or Dwell online sales before we actually buy anything. But, as with most sales, you tend to compromise on what you actually like just to get a bargain. I can’t be the only person with the ‘I don’t love it but I got 85% off and saved £216’ method of sale shopping, can I?

Bin, hand, hand, bin – just like that!

Our obsession with Made.com started a few years back when we were looking for a bin for our newly fitted kitchen. This might seem an easy task, well you’d be wrong! It HAD to be black, it HAD to be small enough to fit (and open) under the counter top and it HAD to be different. We nearly settled on a Brabantia 30 litre bin, but at £106, the price put us off. Then Saff spotted this very similar bin from Made.com. Same size, same colour but this one had clever touch free sensors to open the lid that closes after five seconds of inactivity. Perfect if your wife has slight OCD tendencies, but the main reason we bought it, it was only £39 – £50 cheaper than the typical high street price, a saving of over 55%.

Frostini auditioned for Pixar, but he was far too tall for the role of Luxo Jr.

Our next dilemma – we needed a floor lamp and really didn’t want to go down the IKEA route (although we do love IKEA). The space was limited and we were struggling to find a lamp that would suit the rest of the room. Again we searched on Made.com and found Frosini, a modern matt black lamp with an industrial feel and only £79 (typical high street price £176).

I love to get into Stow’s drawers!

Now we were on a interiors purchasing roll, so what’s next? One thing that I hate is piles of paperwork (especially bills) making our table look untidy. Be it letters for Saff, ripped out recipes and reviews from mags and newspapers or the kid’s homework books, these piles get on my wick. In our little cottage storage is always an issue. Whenever we saw a little cabinet or chest of drawers, I whipped out my tape measure (I always carry one – sad I know) only to be disappointed that they’re too big. Then we found the Stow small storage unit in vintage brass that matched our Biba-esque wallpaper perfectly and more importantly fit into that awkward little space in the corner of our room. At £179 it was a little more than we’d usually pay but considering the typical high street price is £285, it still saved us over £100. Plus sometimes you just have to break the bank, especially for an item that looks as if it has been built just for us.

Top of our wish list…

As you may have guessed we are just a little infatuated by Made.com, you go on there to look for one thing, and then fall in love with something you probably don’t really need, like this drinks caddy above. But if there is a downside, it’s the fairly log delivery times. There was a five week wait for our bin, that said if the item has ‘express delivery’ next to it then it should arrive within the week. ‘So why does it take so long?’ I hear you cry in despair. It’s all to save you money, hence the big savings on the high street price. Basically every seven days they combine all the orders and after a week send then off to be made. By only manufacturing what’s been ordered they can reduce their costs. Result! Their online real-time tracking is a doddle to use too.

Apparently another reason that they manage to offer savings of up to 70%, is because anything that you order comes straight from the makers. Their website proudly states ‘No warehouses. No physical stores. No middlemen.’ But to be honest, we don’t really care how they keep their prices low. We just love their brilliant range of furniture and accessories, their website is easy to navigate too, all the products have loads of pictures and a really clear sizing guide.

Well I’m off to measure the space that our old bedside cabinets currently occupy and the kids wardrobes and the computer desk and the…

made.com

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We were sent a complementary item from Made.com, this does not affect our review in any way. We always write with complete honesty.