Modular bathroom furniture is just storage that fits around plumbing

Summary: Modular bathroom furniture is only useful if it works around plumbing, tile edges, floor fall, and odd gaps. Measure the real bathroom first, then choose or cut modules to fit the smallest usable dimensions.

The bathroom in our old flat in Amsterdam was 1.6 m by 2.1 m. Toilet on the short wall, basin facing it, shower in the corner, and a single 74 cm gap between the basin and the door where, in theory, you could put storage. Off-the-shelf bathroom cabinets came in 60 cm and 80 cm. Always. I measured five shops. I'm not joking, five.

We ended up stacking three plastic boxes from Hema and pretending they were a system.

That's the entire reason "modular bathroom furniture" exists as a search term. People are trying to fit storage into a room that was never planned for storage, around plumbing that was put there in 1973 and isn't moving.

What modular actually means here

The word gets thrown around. In a bathroom context it has a useful, narrow meaning: a set of carcasses (the box bits) and fronts (doors, drawers) that come in repeated widths and a single depth, and stack or sit beside each other to fill a wall. Think of it like Lego with three or four shapes instead of forty.

A typical European bathroom system runs:

• carcass widths of 30, 40, 60, 80, sometimes 1.2 m
• depth of 35 to 46 cm (the two common standards)
• height in modules of 35, 70, or 1.4 m so things stack cleanly

You pick a depth, then mix widths along the wall until the numbers add up. If your wall is 1.8 m and your modules are 60 + 60 + 60 cm, that's a system. If your wall is 1.82 m, you have a 2 cm gap and you've now discovered the problem with most modular bathroom furniture.

Where it falls over

The 2 cm gap. Plumbing. Skirting boards. A sloped tile.

Real bathrooms are full of obstructions that modular catalogues don't anticipate. The waste pipe under the basin sits 18 cm off the floor and 12 cm out from the wall. Your beautiful 46 cm deep base unit fouls it. So you cut a notch. Now your warranty's voided and the cut edge is showing raw chipboard to the steam.

I had a tiler tell me once, while we were trying to fit a vanity around a half-tiled wall, "the wall is never the wall." He meant: tiles add about a centimetre, mortar adds a bit more, the wall itself is rarely plumb, and a 60 cm cabinet might suddenly be living in a 58.8 cm slot. He was right.

The other failure point is height. Bathroom systems specify the wall-hung height for the basin, usually around 85 cm to the rim. But the floor isn't level, the basin isn't level until you shim it, and the cabinet under it is supposed to clear the trap by at least 5 cm. If your floor falls just over a centimetre across the basin's footprint (mine did), one side of the cabinet sits proud. You see it every morning when you brush your teeth. You can't unsee it.

What's actually in a good modular set

Strip the marketing and there are five components that matter.

The carcass is what you don't see. 18 mm moisture-resistant MDF with a melamine face is the standard, and it's fine. Plywood is better and rare in this category. Solid wood is showing-off wood. The carcass should have an aluminium foot rail or adjustable feet, not a fixed plinth, because a fixed plinth at 60 cm width and a floor that drops half a centimetre is going to look bad.

The fronts are what you see and pay for. Lacquered MDF in a slab style is the common cheap-but-good answer. Veneered ply or veneered MDF gets you wood grain at MDF prices. Real wood fronts move in humid bathrooms and need a clear-coat that's actually rated for steam, not just a generic varnish.

Drawer runners are where price hides. Soft-close, full-extension, 30 kg load minimum if you're going to put a hairdryer and a stack of towels in a drawer. Cheap runners on a 60 cm drawer will sag inside two years. Blum and Hettich are the names you want on the side of the rail.

Sealing at the wall and the floor. A modular cabinet that doesn't seal at the back top edge will trap steam and grow mould behind it. Silicone, properly applied, around the wall side of the worktop and the floor edge of the plinth.

Hardware: hinges that adjust in three planes, not two. Bathroom doors get bumped, kicked, leaned on. A hinge that only adjusts up-down and left-right won't fix a door that's pulled forward 2 mm.

What you'll spend

Rough numbers, IKEA-and-up, in 2026.

• Three-piece basin run with one drawer cabinet and two open shelves, all from a flat-pack system: 400 to 700 euros, plus the basin and tap.
• A six-piece run with mirrored cabinets above, drawers below, and a tall 35 cm column for towels, in a mid-tier brand (Burgbad, Villeroy & Boch's lower lines, Duravit's L-Cube): 1,800 to 3,500 euros.
• A made-to-measure version of the same set, where the widths are cut to your wall and the depth is whatever fits around your waste pipe: usually 25 to 60 percent more than the brand version, depending on where you order it.

Buying modular and modifying it on-site is where most renovations end up. It's almost never the cheapest path, because labour to cut and re-edge melamine is real money and the joiner you hire to do it would rather have built it right the first time.

The actual workflow that works

Measure the wall in three places: floor, mid-height, ceiling. Write down the smallest number. That's your wall length.

Find every obstruction. Waste pipe, water inlets, electrical sockets, the line where the tiles end. Note the heights and offsets carefully. Take a photo with a tape measure in shot.

Decide depth before width. A 35 cm depth gives you knee room and a tighter footprint. 46 cm gives you proper drawer space. A bathroom under 4 m² almost always wants 35 cm.

Work out widths last, against the smallest wall measurement, allowing about 1 cm of slack on each end for filler panels. Sketch it on graph paper before you order anything. A bathroom fitter told me the classic mistake is a 1.2 m carcass arriving for a 1.18 m wall.

If your wall is 1.81 m and the closest modular combination is 1.8 m, that 1 cm gap is what custom fitting actually solves. Pre-cut panels in the exact widths, pre-drilled, the whole thing fitting like it was meant to.

If you've spent a Sunday afternoon trying to make 60 + 60 + 60 cm fit a wall that is 1.81 m wide and isn't quite plumb, that's exactly the problem knuslabs.com was built to solve.

If you're planning the same kind of project, start with custom TV unit concepts or compare it with modular conference table concepts. For adjacent planning detail, read Modular rattan garden furniture, and the gap that nobody fills and Modular table, what it actually means once you stop looking at the renders.