When I had a bachelor pad, I had a closet system installed in the master closet.  It was this type of system.

It looked decent, and was functional, but it was expensive, and not really built to last.  After a few years, the melamine started peeling off in a few places, the plastic levelers underneath started to buckle and crack, and it had that somewhats artificial look and feel.  And it was expensive, in the many thousands of dollars.

For our closets this time around, we opted for a simpler and more basic approach.  We had the drawer units in our master closet manufactured by our cabinet makers, so those weren’t cheap, but they are far higher quality than the drawers of any closet system (the same stuff as our high-end kitchen cabinets).   The rest of the closets, and the shelf and pole in our master closet, were built by couple of carpenters we hired by the hours out of MDF and other wood, to be painted by our painters.  Once painted, you would never know what kind of wood is under there anyways.

Our painters do quite an extraordinary job, so we know it will look very nice when they are done.  The end result is that our closets look very nice, are exactly what we want, and cost us far less if they were done by a professional closet company.  We also felt that it was much more in the craftsman style to do it this way.  We may not have showroom closets, but that’s not really our style anyways.

Here is the master closet before painting.

That center island will get some stone.