Furniture

Just gone through this.

tl;dr:

• Ikea if you won't spend more than £400 on each item, and treat that as disposable
  
• £400 and up: M&S seem to have the best mid range stuff that might be well made to survive a house move that Ikea stuff will not. Everything else was either to spendy and / or shit, except the Heal's Brunel range.
  
• £1000 and up - Heals / Ercol but you are in to furniture for life stuff
  
  

Unless you are spending £1k and up per item, expect serious compromises.

• the hipster friendly stuff from Made / Swoon is shit. Or rather, given what you are paying, it's not good enough. Draws don't fit, no runners.
  
• Habitat's stuff is OK but it's only a step up from Ikea unless you buy their spendiest stuff
  
• Heal's have some nice stuff - the Brunel kit seems well made, but it's quite small. The Fawn chest and wardrobe looks great in the flesh, seems well built and is fairly priced - but it's spendy. I really wanted to love this but it's too flimsy to justify the £700 you'll spend on it.
  
• West Elm's stuff is similar to Swoon / Made - it's just not good enough, and is pretending to be something it isn't. The industrial stuff it at least honest, but spendy
  
• John Lewis's stuff is all too flimsy and overpriced IMHO
  
• Ercol do some wallet friendly stuff. We didn't see it in the flesh, but I'd hope it would be better than the John Lewis stuff. We did see the wallet bashing stuff they do, and it was nicely made and looked great, but priced to match
  
  

Ended up buying some stuff from M&S - the Sonoma range seemed to hit the price / quality sweetspot. Proof will be in the eating.