Costing

Producing a custom built kitchen is often a very time consuming business and this does mean that our work is not very competitively priced compared with retailers of mass produced kitchen components. Typically, our kitchens cost between £20,000 and £30,000 excluding VAT and appliances (although several projects we have recently completed have cost in excess of £50,000). The costs can vary enormously depending on the choice of materials used and on the construction techniques employed.

Buying a mass produced kitchen from a High Street retailer is inevitably going to be cheaper than coming to Lethenty Mill. We don’t feel we should apologise for that but we would like to explain where the money goes and what you get for it…

Our kitchens are very well made and are certainly more durable than mass production kitchens. We use the best quality hardware and fabulous local hardwoods but these are not the main reasons for the difference in cost. It’s mainly because designing and making a kitchen purely as a one off is a completely different process – It’s not nearly as efficient as assembling a kitchen from a series of ready made units. At least 75% of our charges are labour costs. (This is not because we are all fabulously well paid, in fact, low skilled carpenters assembling kit houses on a building site generally earn more.) Labour costs are high because we put a lot of time and effort into everything we do. We design and make things well and that takes time. We also build them traditionally. There is no high tech CNC machinery churning out thousands of identical components ready to be assembled with plastic clips. We use simple, solid machinery which is better suited to small scale production and gives us total freedom in design. Of course we could use cheaper construction methods or buy in mass produced kitchen components to cut costs but that’s not what we’re about. It’s a satisfying and rewarding job - designing and making something purpose built and well made using the best of local timbers. It gives us a sense of integrity about what we do and that’s something we value.

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