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Our Contemporary Wardrobes are drawn from a selection of our ranges including Oak, Painted and Mango. With a variety of styles and shades to choose from, we have something to suit all tastes. Browse through the complete collection to find the perfect Contemporary Wardrobe for your home.
Why not refresh the rest of the bedroom by adding one of our stunning Contemporary Beds to your order ?

An inauspicious start for pine furniture
In Britain at least, pine furniture was originally intended for the poorer end of the furniture buying spectrum.  People of affluence commissioned their furniture from cabinet makers and would have it made in one the hardwoods, such as oak.  If they could afford it, mahogany would be used.  Sometimes it would be a hardwood wardrobe with veneers of the more expensive woods such as walnut or mahogany laid over the top.   

Pine was imported in large quantities and sometimes furniture made from this timber would be referred to as deal.  This term was originally applied to the quantity of timber being traded. Originally the minimum dimensions for a deal were 7ins wide, 3ins thick and 6 feet in length.  A deal might be pine but could also apply to fir trees, which are also fast growing coniferous trees found in many of the same regions as pines.   

Deal or pine wardrobes might therefore have been bought by the upper working, or lower middle classes in Victorian Britain but the very poorest would have found the price of even a pine wardrobe unachievable and, with almost nothing to put in it, pointless.  But the wealthier sections of society might well have purchased pine wardrobes, not for their own use, but for the use of their army of household servants.  This was the era when many children left their families and entered ‘into service’ at the age of 12 or 13.   

New beginnings for light, bright furniture
The two World Wars all but obliterated this social order and, in many of Britain’s industrial towns, much of the furniture.  In post-war Britain, everyone was going to have decent housing, either privately-owned or provided by the state.  The dark, gloomy, buildings of the Victorian era were swept away in an urge to live in clean, light conditions.  Heavily ornate Victorian furniture was out of favour and pine came into its own.   

Shops such as the newly-established Habitat and suppliers of Scandinavian-style furniture used pine.  It was seen a light and fresh and fitted perfectly with the desire for a new style of living.  Towards the end of the 1960s, it was realised that much of the dark Victorian furniture from farmhouse and country cottage sales was actually pine furniture under generations of coatings of dirt and wax polish.  If this furniture, including many pine wardrobes, was cleaned back to the bare wood it had an attractive light colour, which had been mellowed by age.  The age of stripped pine furniture had arrived.   

The dawn of stripped pine
It is perhaps of passing interest to note that this is how our supplier CPW or Country Pine Warehouse, to give it its full name, started in business.  The company sourced antique or Victorian pine furniture, stripped it and sold it on.  This explains the company’s expertise today in manufacturing traditional styles of furniture in solid pine.   

There is a characteristic of all wooden furniture and pine furniture in particular, that sometimes confuses purchasers.  This is the fact that pine will change colour as it ages.  When pine furniture is brand new, it is almost white in colour.  As it ages, atmospheric conditions will cause the wood to darken and yellow.  This is an inevitable part of the process and all wax, lacquer and other finishes will exacerbate this effect to a greater or lesser degree.    

The colour of a pine wardrobe
Problems may arise when, for example, a pine wardrobe is purchased to be followed some years later by another item of pine bedroom furniture from the same range.  On delivery there will be, to the consternation of the householder, a disparity in colour between the two items.  They will not have noticed the gradual change in colour over the years of ownership.  Fortunately, within the space of perhaps a year, the difference between the two colours will reduce significantly.

We hope that you have found something that suits your needs from our fantastic variety of pine wardrobes.