Planning custom furniture for a Koh Samui villa

Custom or ready-made? Settle this first

The short version: ready-made is fine for loose, freestanding pieces — dining chairs, side tables, beds that stand on their own feet. Custom earns its cost wherever a piece has to relate to the building: alcoves, wall-to-wall storage, window seats, anything under a sloped ceiling or against an uneven rendered wall.

That's a compressed answer to a bigger question. We've written a full comparison — the full custom-vs-ready-made comparison — covering timelines, quality control and repairability. Decide the split early, because it determines which rooms need a proper survey and which just need a shopping list.

Measure like a fitter, not a shopper

Work in millimetres, never centimetres rounded to the nearest finger. Measure each wall at three heights — floor, waist, head — because rendered concrete walls are rarely plumb, and the difference between top and bottom can be 20mm or more. Take both diagonals of any alcove or room: if they differ, the space is out of square, and a rectangular piece built to the tape's happiest number will not go in.

For anything fitted, the honest advice is: don't measure it yourself at all. When the site survey is inside the workshop's scope, the dimensions become their responsibility rather than yours — ask any maker you talk to whether it is. Your own tape measure is for feasibility and rough budgeting; the maker's site survey is the document the work gets built from.

Decide storage before style

Storage is the least glamorous decision and the one that shapes everything else. Count what the house actually has to hold — linen for guest turnover if it's a rental, luggage, cleaning kit, the paperwork and spares every household accumulates — and give it all a home before choosing a single visible piece. Fitted storage in the dead zones (under stairs, above doorways, the blind side of a bathroom wall) frees the good walls for furniture you want to look at.

Let the villa's layout drive the brief

Villas here are built around air and views: double-height living rooms, glass walls, rooms that open onto terraces. That geometry punishes standard furniture. A 2.4m wardrobe looks marooned under a five-metre ceiling; a sideboard designed for a solid wall blocks half of a glass one. Walk each room and note what the furniture must actually do — divide space without cutting light, turn a corner, sit below a window line — and let those constraints write the brief. A good maker designs from the room's fixed points: sills, aircon units, door swings, the line of the view.

Design for the climate, not against it

The island's heat, humidity and salt air are part of the brief, not background. Two mechanisms do most of the damage, and both can be designed for.

Coordinate the design early

If an architect or interior designer is involved, bring the furniture maker into the conversation while the drawings are still drawings — built-ins affect skirting lines, aircon positions and lighting plans, and changes are cheap on paper. Anything with integrated lighting or an appliance needs its positions agreed with your electrician or plumber before fabrication; the workshop builds around those agreed points rather than doing that work itself. Building from a designer's drawings is entirely normal — but expect the maker to flag anything that still needs deciding before a saw touches wood.

Plan the installation, not just the piece

Delivery on an island has its own logistics. Hillside villas are often reached by steep concrete tracks a large truck can't take, so ask how the pieces will arrive and whether the crew has seen the access — a good installer scouts it before delivery day. Inside, hard floors need protecting, big pieces need a measured route through doors and stair turns, and fitted work should be dry-fitted, scribed to the real walls, and only then fixed. Rain matters more than you'd think: cardboard, chipboard and a sudden downpour are a bad combination, so unpacking happens under cover.

Choosing a workshop on the island

Judge a workshop by its process, not its adjectives. Useful questions: when does the lead-time clock start — at deposit, or at approved drawings? Who measures, and who owns it if the measurements are wrong? What happens if the schedule slips? Are delivery and installation included, and who does the fixing to walls? Ask to see work in progress, not just finished photos — a maker with its own production workshop on the island (ours is in Chaweng) can show you carcasses mid-build, which tells you more than any portfolio.

Finally, expect straight answers about materials. A workshop that tells you what it would not use for your job — and why — is worth more than one that agrees with everything.