Service
Fitted home offices and studies
RGS Carpentry builds fitted home offices for houses across Surrey: desks, shelving and storage made to the room rather than bought to fill it. Most of the useful ones are not spare rooms at all; they are landings, alcoves, understairs voids and box rooms that nobody had worked out how to use.
- Lead time
- 3–5 weeks
- Desk height
- 720–740mm, set to your chair
The anatomy of an understairs study.
The limiting dimension in an understairs office is never floor area. It is the height of the soffit above where your head goes.
Our own setting-out drawing, not a photograph. Numbers key to the notes belowalongside.
Desk at 730mm
The standard office desk height, and the one nearly every task chair is designed around. Built-in desks get made too high surprisingly often, because a joiner working from a standing position judges it by eye.
The stair over
The soffit falls in a straight line, so the usable height changes across the whole width. The design has to follow it rather than fight it.
The seated envelope
You need roughly 900mm of clear height above the desk where you actually sit, and about 600mm of depth for knees. Everything outside that envelope is storage, not workspace. Working this out first is what stops an understairs office being a desk you cannot sit at.
Storage where the head height runs out
The low end of a stair soffit is the best cupboard space in the house and useless for anything else. Deep drawers on runners beat shelves here, because you can pull the contents out rather than crawling in.
Grommet over a socket at the back
One hole through the desk, one socket behind it, and the cables never appear. Adding this afterwards means taking the desk off.
What you actually get.
- Desk built at the right height and depth for your chair and screens
- Cable management and grommets planned around your kit
- Shelving, pinboard and filing built into the same run
- Solutions for landings, understairs voids and box rooms
- Optional doors so the whole thing closes at the end of the day
- Coordination with your electrician for power and data at the desk
What it is made from, and why.
The question that decides how a piece ages, and the one almost nobody asks before signing.
- 25mm MR-MDF desktop
- A desk takes point loads and leaning. 18mm will deflect over anything more than about 900mm unsupported; 25mm with a lipped front edge will not.
- Hardwood or laminate desk edge
- The front edge is the one part of a desk that gets touched every day. A painted MDF arris will chip within a year. A hardwood lipping or a laminated edge will not.
- Painted MDF carcasses
- Stable, paintable, and cheap enough that the budget goes into the parts you touch.
- Acoustic slat panel
- Worth considering on the wall behind the screen if you are on video calls in a hard-surfaced room. It makes a genuine, audible difference to how you sound.
Why two quotes for “the same job” differ by thousands.
Nobody else in Surrey publishes this. It is the difference between a number you can plan around and a number you have to take on trust.
Guide prices
- Fitted desk with shelving over
- £1,400 – £3,000
- Full-wall office with storage and closing doors
- £3,200 – £7,000
- Understairs study, fitted out
- £2,400 – £5,500
Indicative 2026 figures for Surrey, including materials and fitting. A guide, not a quote. Your quote is fixed, in writing, and comes after we have measured.
- Desk length and whether storage runs full height
- Painted versus timber-faced surfaces
- Power and data: how much new electrical work is involved
- Whether the space is a straightforward rectangle or something awkward
- Whether doors close the whole thing away, which roughly doubles the door count
- Understairs work is slower per metre than a spare room, because nothing in it is square
From the first visit to the last adjustment.
Design visit
We measure the space and, if it is understairs, the soffit line at several points. We will ask you to sit where the desk is going, because the seated envelope is the design.
Drawing and fixed price
A section as well as an elevation for anything under a stair — the section is the drawing that shows whether it works.
First fix
Carcasses in, and the electrician in for power and data behind the desk while the back is still open.
Desk, shelving and doors
Desktop fitted and lipped, shelving in, doors hung and aligned.
Finishing
Filled, caulked and painted, with the grommet cut and the cables dressed.
When not to call us
If you have a spare room with a flat wall and a normal ceiling, a good freestanding desk and a bookcase will cost you a tenth of this and you can take them with you. Built-in furniture earns its money where the space is genuinely awkward, or where you need the room to stop being an office at six o’clock.
The things people ask first.
Can you fit an office under the stairs?
Often, yes. Understairs is one of the most rewarding spaces to work with because it is almost always wasted. The limiting factor is headroom at the desk position rather than floor area — you want roughly 900mm of clear height above the desk where you sit. Below that, it becomes very good storage instead.
What desk height should I ask for?
730mm is the standard and suits most people with an adjustable chair. If you are much taller or shorter than average, say so at the survey — it costs nothing to change on a drawing and cannot be changed at all afterwards.
Can you build in a sit-stand desk?
Yes, though it changes the design considerably: the desktop has to be free of the carcasses on at least three sides, so you lose the built-in look on the desk itself. It is usually better to build storage and shelving around a bought sit-stand frame than to try to make one look fitted.
How do you deal with a landing that is a fire escape route?
Carefully, and sometimes not at all. A protected escape route has to stay clear and the materials in it matter. If your landing is the only way out of the bedrooms, we will look at what can go in it and tell you honestly if the answer is very little.
Can it close up so the room stops being an office?
Yes, and it is one of the most worthwhile things you can spend money on if the room is also used for something else. Doors on the whole run roughly double the door count, so it does show in the price.
Home offices across Surrey.
Each town page describes the building stock we are actually working with there, which is what decides how a job like this is detailed.
Tell us what you are trying to fit, and where it has to go.
Four quick questions, no essay and no obligation. We will come and measure, and you will have a drawing and a fixed price within a week.
Every enquiry answered within one working day.