California Wardrobes makes wardrobe doors and the systems behind them, and manufactures 99% of the doors it supplies at its Henderson factory. It’s 100% New Zealand owned, designed, manufactured and installed.

Doors come flat, bi-fold, sliding or hinged, plus aluminium framed mirror sliders, in primed, lacquer or melamine finish. Villa and bungalow profiles are made for older character homes, which is the part most wardrobe ranges skip. Because the doors are made here rather than imported to a standard size, an odd width or an unusual height isn’t a problem to design around.

That matters more than it sounds in an older house. A door profile that looks right in a photograph can sit badly against a villa architrave, and bead moulding and batten spacing are close to impossible to judge from a website thumbnail. Seeing the profiles at full height, against your own photographs, is the only reliable way to settle it.

Board finishes use a sustainably produced New Zealand-made MDF substrate laminated with premium melamine sheets, and the hardware comes from Blum, Häfele, Hettich and Enko. If your walls aren’t straight and plumb, which they probably aren’t in anything pre-war, scriber panels take up the difference.

Interiors are built to the space: hanging rails, drawer banks, shelving, angled shoe racks and mirror strips. Allow 600mm from the back wall to the inside of the doors and an adult wardrobe works properly. Everything carries a 10 year warranty, and it holds where an authorised installer does the fit.

Two constraints are worth knowing before the plans are fixed. Sliding door tracks have to be laid before the carpet goes down, while hinged and bi-fold doors work above it. And California Wardrobes doesn’t do structural or gib work, though it can suggest builders who do.