Closets by Design

After a complete nightmare renovating our home, we promised ourselves we would review each of the contractors who was in. Closest by Design does a pretty good job. The problem is just something everyone should be aware of before ordering and triple check on your own. The Lincoln Park designer is very nice but like the previous reviewer mentioned, almost all of our custom work was measured incorrectly. Thankfully we had some really good installers who were able to fix some things on site. But this is something you should be VERY careful with when ordering. Triple check all of the measurements to make sure the designs will work — don’t just take it for granted that it was right the first time.
Some examples of measurement issues: 1. Our master closets were supposed to have sliding doors on them but the way our designer placed the closet drawers, we would have been unable to open the drawers. We ended up needing to put bifold doors on instead of the sliders in order to use the drawers — and that almost didn’t work either. 2. In our linen closet, the shelves were measured too deep so that the top shelf is basically flush with the top of the door. Thus, we lost all of the storage space from the top of the shelving unit to the ceiling. 3. Walls are never 100% straight so when we did some bookshelves that were supposed to fit into a specific wall to wall space, the unit was flush in parts but jutted away from the wall in other parts. I ended up coming up with a solution to hide the problem (which is hard to describe here) but that ended up costing us another several hundred $. Again, the installers we had were very good for the most part (some better than others) and we were lucky that the best team we had worked on our hardest install (a large murphy bed wall with bookshelves and uneven walls).
Customer service was OK. Since we had so many problems and so much work done, they became more accommodating in the end but they were not the easiest to deal with initially. Scheduling is pretty far out — usually 4 – 8 weeks — and impossible to change if your schedule changes. They are very inflexible here.
Oh, and the laminate surfaces do chip a bit… especially the dark colors and even on the highest upgrade they offer. Furniture markers will hide but it’s something to be careful with.
All in all, I’d say 3 stars is fair. Not the worst we dealt with but not the best either. That said, we will probably return to them for our final closet space so that everything matches.