Harvey Jones

We chose Harvey Jones for our new kitchen because the house is old/characterful and the kitchen a non-standard shape. We felt that the combination of traditional design and a degree of bespoke carpentry would best suit the house. We'd been in the house for approximately five years before taking the decision to re-do the kitchen, and during that time we'd formed a good idea of what didn't work with the existing layout, but we weren't sure what the options were, or how best to rearrange. Matthew, our designer at HJ made several visits to the property, and came up with a range of suggestions. We found the iterative process to be very helpful — the initial designs had elements we liked and those that were less appealing — and enabled us to identify what was important to us, selecting and combining components from each design. We found Matthew's suggestions, insights and patience to be very helpful in this process. In addition to the basic design, Matthew was very good at suggesting more practical and cost-saving alternatives. For instance, it turned out to be cheaper to buy a couple of new Fisher Paykel fridges than it would have been to construct a housing around our existing fridges. Another example was when he suggested we replaced a drawer unit beneath an over with a warming drawer — again, same cost, but the addition of the warming drawer tipped us over a loyalty threshold with the manufacturer to give us a range of extra benefits. We ended up keeping the plumbing in the same place as previously, but with vastly improved fridge freezer storage and a far larger sink unit, but moved the location of the ovens, replacing what had been a range in an alcove with a large built-in oven under two hobs in a different part of the kitchen, and adding a separate stack of spare oven, microwave and warming drawer. This move has completely changed the working flow of the kitchen and is a huge improvement. It's this sort of input from the HJ designer that enabled us to achieve the end result we wanted, but probably couldn't have envisioned. It wasn't a cheap operation, but the quality appears to be there, and for an awkward layout in an old house the bespoke element made it worthwhile. The revised cooking area, voluminous Fisher Paykel fidge freezers, large sink and the expanse of worktops have been the core successes in the functionality of the new kitchen. Given the bespoke element, some of the success will depend on the individual craftsmen. The carpenter/fitter we had (Dan) was fantastic and did a superb job in crafting and fitting the units to irregular walls. A less skilful job here could have drastically affected the results. The painting of the units was decent, though not quite up to 'showroom standard', and with a couple of years of wear and tear this has proved to be the slightly weaker element of the finish with some of the colour coming off along the top edges of drawers as they (presumably) rub ever so slightly against the surrounds. However, given it's hand painted, it should be a straight forward job to touch it up. We've been using the finished product for almost two years now, and it's performing splendidly. We're delighted that we chose HJ, and were fortunate to work with Matthew. With hindsight, we'd do exactly the same again — designer, company and final layout / choice of appliances.

We're really impressed with the quality of their furniture, and our designer was highy knowledgable and generous with his time.