Built in bathroom cabinets, and the ten centimetres that decide everything
Summary: Built in bathroom cabinets earn their keep when the room has awkward gaps, pipes, door swings, and wet-room materials to think through. Measure the span, plumbing, swing, material, hardware, and electrics before you compare bespoke bathroom cabinet quotes.
The bathroom in our last flat was 1.86 m wide. The basin was 60 cm. The toilet sat in a corner that wasn't quite square. Between the basin and the side wall there was a 73 cm gap that nothing in the catalog wanted to live in. Every off-the-shelf cabinet was 60 or 80 cm. The 60 cm one left a finger-width strip of drywall that collected toothpaste. The 80 cm one didn't fit. I'd already painted the wall a colour I liked, which somehow made the empty strip worse.
That gap is why people end up looking at built in bathroom cabinets in the first place. Bathrooms are the room in the house most full of weird small dimensions. Soil pipes that bulge out, windowsills at the wrong height, a chimney breast on one wall, a sloped ceiling on the other. Nothing in a flat-pack catalog is built for that. Something fitted is, by definition, the thing that fits.
The gap, the swing, and the soil pipe
Before any cabinet question, you measure three things. The clear span. The door swing. The plumbing.
Span is what most people get right. You take a tape and measure the wall from corner to corner, then again at hip height, then again at the floor. They're rarely the same. Old plaster moves about. New plaster is closer but never perfect. My bathroom was 1.86 m at the top, just under 1.85 m at the floor. A built-in has to land somewhere between those, with a scribe strip on one side to take up the slack.
Door swing is what gets forgotten. The bathroom door opens inward by maybe 70 cm. If you put a 60 cm wide cabinet on the wall behind that door, the handle of the door hits it. People notice this in the showroom and forget it at home. Stand in your bathroom with a tape measure. Open the door. Mark where it lands. That's a no-go zone.
The soil pipe is the one that sets the budget. If you have an 11 cm waste running vertically behind the basin, the back of any built-in unit needs to box around it, or sit forward of it. Boxing in costs about 80 to 150 euros in extra material and one extra day of labour. Sitting the cabinet forward of the pipe loses you anywhere from 4 to 8 cm of room depth, which in a small bathroom is a lot. There is no way to talk yourself out of either choice. The pipe wins.
What wood does in a wet room
A bathroom is a wet room with delusions. Even with extraction running, the air in there hits 80 percent humidity for an hour every morning. That eats most of the materials a kitchen would shrug off.
Standard MDF is a non-starter. It swells. The edges go fluffy. Within two years the bottom of the door looks like a damp biscuit. Moisture-resistant MDF, the green-tinted stuff sold as MR-MDF, holds up if every cut edge is sealed. Not most. Every. The minute one untreated edge gets a splash, the swell starts there and works inward.
Birch plywood is the better answer for built in bathroom cabinets if the budget allows. 18 mm birch ply, edges sealed with a clear water-based varnish or a polyurethane lacquer, will outlast the bathroom. A cabinetmaker I spoke to had a basin unit in birch ply that had been steamed twice a day for four years. The only mark on it was a coffee ring. It sanded out.
Solid timber is fine for the door fronts but moves with humidity. If you want a solid oak or walnut front, ask the maker to use frame and panel construction so the panel can float in its frame. A glued-up solid panel will warp. Not maybe. Will.
For the worktop above a vanity, go either solid surface (Corian, HI-MACS, the resin composites) or a sealed stone. Laminate worktops in bathrooms last about as long as the warranty.
Doors, drawers, and the push-to-open question
Push-to-open mechanisms are the obvious move in a bathroom because they look clean and you don't want toothpaste on the handles. They are also the hardware most likely to fail in a humid room. The spring loaded latches inside corrode. Within three or four years they start sticking.
Magnetic touch-latches with a separate magnet on the door and a pivoting striker on the frame hold up better, because the moving parts can be sealed stainless. If you go push-to-open, ask for stainless or marine-grade hardware specifically. The maker will know what you mean.
Drawers in a bathroom are underrated. A 50 cm deep drawer holds twice the usable stuff of a cabinet of the same volume because you can see the back of it without crouching. The mechanism is a soft-close runner, which in bathrooms wants to be a Blum or Hettich runner with a humidity rating, not the unbranded thing that ships with cheap flat-pack. About 20 euros a pair more, and they're still working when you sell the house.
For door hinges, six-way adjustable European hinges with a clip-on plate are the standard for a reason. They're cheap. They survive damp. They let you adjust for the day in March when the wall settles a millimetre.
Lights, sockets, and the cable you forgot
The thing that wrecks a custom build is realising afterwards that you wanted a socket inside a drawer for the electric toothbrush, and now you can't have one without ripping the cabinet out. Plan the electrics with the cabinet drawing in front of you.
Roughly: one IP-rated socket inside the vanity (zone 2 in UK regs, similar in Dutch NEN), an LED strip under the worktop overhang for night light, and a switched feed for any backlit mirror. If you're putting an electric demister behind the mirror, the cabinet behind that mirror needs ventilation slots, or the mirror cooks.
Run conduit through the cabinet carcass during the build. Every cable that gets added afterwards by drilling is a cable that wants to leak.
Prices and lead times
A bespoke bathroom cabinets bundle for a typical 1.8 to 2 m bathroom (vanity, mirror cabinet, tall storage column) lands somewhere between 1,800 and 4,200 euros in the Netherlands and Germany, depending on materials and finish. Birch ply with a quality lacquer is the lower end. Veneered oak or walnut with stone tops is the upper end.
Lead times from a small workshop are six to ten weeks. From most made-to-order online options, two to four. Anyone quoting under two weeks is shipping you a stock cabinet in a stock size, which is the thing you were trying to avoid.
Get the spec in writing before you agree to anything: panel material, edge treatment, hinge type, hardware grade, drawer runner brand, clearance dimensions on every side. Three of those will turn out to matter.
If you're sizing up custom bathroom cabinets for a room with a soil pipe in the wrong place and a 73 cm gap nothing fits, that's the workflow we packaged into knuslabs.com.
If you're planning the same kind of project, start with built-in bookcase concepts or compare it with online cabinet maker workflow. For adjacent planning detail, read Custom wardrobe cabinets, when one big wardrobe doesn't fit and Custom made cupboards, and the small mistakes that make them stop fitting.