Bespoke kitchens
Over 150 door ranges, carcases made for your room rather than cut down from standard sizes, and a designer who spent six years fitting kitchens before he started drawing them.
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A kitchen is the most expensive thing most people buy for their house after the house itself, and it's the one they live in every day for the next twenty years. It's worth getting the details right.
We design, supply and install bespoke fitted kitchens across South Essex. Joe draws them, James and Jack fit them, and we manage every other trade the job needs between us. There's nobody working on commission and nobody handing you on.
Where it starts
Joe spent six years installing kitchens before he moved across to design, and then took a degree in kitchen design while continuing to work. That combination matters more than it sounds. Plenty of kitchens look excellent on a screen and turn into a problem the moment someone tries to fit them into a house with a bowed wall and a soil pipe in the wrong place.
He'll come to the house, measure up properly and talk through what you're trying to achieve. Then he produces detailed drawings and realistic visuals in CAD, so you can walk around the kitchen before anything is ordered.
Expect to go back and forth. Nobody gets a kitchen right first time, and the revisions are included.
Styles and ranges
We work with five main door suppliers, which gives us more than 150 ranges covering both traditional and modern kitchens.
For traditional kitchens we supply in-frame ranges, where the door sits inside a visible frame, and lay-on ranges, where it sits on the front of the cabinet. In-frame is the more expensive of the two and the more traditional look; lay-on gives you a similar style for less.
For modern kitchens we supply flat slab, J-trim and rail system ranges. J-trim and rail systems are how you get a handleless kitchen - the difference is in how the opening detail is formed, and it changes both the look and the cost.
Most people arrive with a picture rather than a range name, which is fine. Tell us the style you want, the colour you're after and roughly what you want to spend, and we'll narrow 150 ranges down to a handful worth looking at.
Getting the colour right
Many of our door ranges come with multiple stock colours, paint-to-order palettes, and bespoke paint-to-order options.
Between them that runs to thousands of combinations, which is more choice than is actually helpful - part of our job is cutting that down to something you can decide between.
Bespoke paint-to-order means you're not limited to a supplier's palette. If you've got a colour in mind from elsewhere, it can usually be matched, though it adds to both cost and lead time.
Behind the doors
Anyone can sell you a door. Whether a kitchen still works properly in twenty years comes down to the cabinet behind it.
Our carcases are custom made for each individual kitchen, which means we can build to whatever the room needs rather than working around standard sizes. They're made from 18mm MFC using boards from suppliers like Egger.
Construction is cam and dowel, and glue and dowel where the job calls for it. Cabinets arrive rigid and ready to fit - with the doors, mechanisms and components already installed, wrapped, and delivered on our own transport. They're not flat-packed and assembled in your hallway.
As standard we colour-match units internally and externally to the door you've chosen, wherever a board match exists. If you'd rather have a contrasting interior, that's available too. We use around twenty finishes regularly and have specified as many as eighty different ones in a single year, across a range of colours and woodgrains.
The working parts
The mechanisms are what you touch every day, so they're not somewhere to save money.
Drawers. Base units come fitted as standard with Blum's Legrabox, 500mm deep, in Orion Grey. Other depths are available for special-depth cabinets and dresser units. Blum's drawers, hinges and lift-ups carry a lifetime guarantee from the manufacturer.
Hinges. Our standard hinge has fully integrated soft close, plus a backplate with side, depth and height adjustment - which is what lets us get doors sitting straight in a house where nothing else is.
Upgrades. Oak dovetail drawer boxes are available as an upgrade on any kitchen.
Storage. Almost all our wirework is Kessebohmer - pull-outs in various types and sizes, corner carousels, magic corners and Le Mans units. Corner storage is where most kitchens waste space, and it's worth spending time on at the design stage rather than discovering the problem afterwards.
Surfaces
We supply worktops across the full range: engineered quartz from Cosentino and Caesarstone, sintered surfaces like Dekton, natural stone, and laminate from Duropal.
Which is right depends less on budget than people expect and more on how you use the kitchen. Quartz is the safe all-rounder. Dekton handles heat and UV better, which matters if the run goes past a large window or you're taking it outside. Natural stone is the most characterful and the most demanding. Laminate has improved enormously and is worth considering seriously if the budget is better spent elsewhere.
We'll talk through the trade-offs when we measure up rather than pushing you toward the most expensive option.
The rest of it
We supply appliances from Bosch, Neff, Siemens, Miele, Rangemaster and Samsung, sinks from Blanco, 1810, Abode and Carron, and brassware including Perrin & Rowe.
Buying them through us isn't compulsory. If you've found something cheaper elsewhere, tell us and we'll fit it. What we'd rather avoid is finding out on installation week that an appliance is a different size to the one the kitchen was drawn around.
Fitting
James and Joe are time-served carpenters, and Jack came to installation from an engineering background. James and Jack lead the fitting, and the people fitting your kitchen work here.
Most kitchens need more than carpentry - electrical work, plumbing, sometimes heating, plastering, flooring, tiling and decorating. We coordinate all of it ourselves, so you have one company to deal with rather than five trades who each need the previous one to have finished.
Bring us a room, a rough idea and a budget, and we'll tell you honestly what's possible with it.
Most of our kitchens are local - Hockley, Rochford, Rayleigh, Thorpe Bay, Benfleet and Canvey Island most often.
A kitchen is a job worth travelling for, though, so we take them further afield than the smaller work and always will.
Get started
Tell us about the room and we'll come and measure up. Free, no obligation, and you'll get an honest answer about what's achievable for your budget.
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What we do
Kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms, home offices and fitted furniture - designed, supplied and installed by the same three people, from the first drawing to the final handover.
Talk to Us
We cover Hockley and South Essex. Call, email, or send us a few details about the room - you'll be speaking to one of the brothers, not a call centre.
James Charles Interiors is a family-run business in Hockley, Essex, led by brothers James, Joe and Jack Buckingham. We've been designing, supplying and installing bespoke kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms and fitted furniture since 2008 - drawn in-house by a qualified designer, and fitted by our own carpenters.
James Charles Interiors Ltd
Black Barns, Church Road, Hockley, Essex, SS5 6AE.
Registered in England & Wales, company no. 14180273
T: 07415 938795
E: info@jamescharlesinteriors.uk
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