Shopping Eagle

The Cotswold Company is an online home furnishing shop. They offer beautiful wood furniture as well as the usual MFI looking particleboard furniture, soft furnishing, decorations, mirrors, rugs, and cushions - basically everything you need to furnish your home.

The website is easy to navigate because the menu is broken down into the different rooms in your home, and then broken down again into categories. The annoying thing is there are only six products per page so you can be scrolling and turning pages for a while before you find what you need… or give up. Every item has the sizes clearly listed so you can measure the space where you are trying to put the cabinet or couch - or whatever item you are looking for.

I find the prices very reasonable for the quality of the items. I purchased a few larger items that I couldn’t easily get home from a local Homebase or B&Q. The most complicated and largest item was a tower unit for our bathroom.

I had been looking for an odd shaped unit for a small space for a few years with very little luck, I wasn’t willing to spend the £150 Homebase wanted for a similar fake-wood unit. I found a fantastic tower cabinet in white on Cotswold for just £69.99 (on sale at the time). I ordered it and it was delivered within 6 days, not the 14 days they advise - which is exceptional because at the time I lived in the Highlands where deliveries could take an extra 2 weeks!

It ended up MUCH larger and heavier than I imagined it would be, making me really glad I hadn’t tried to buy it locally.

I love flat-pack furniture (like a big fun puzzle!) so I opened it right away - HUGE mistake, I should have taken it upstairs to the floor where it would be located and cleared the space to put it together! As it was, I sat on the living room floor, slowly took all the bits out of the box and started putting it together.

The instructions were easy, it used the funny locking screws that usually come in flat-pack furniture so all I needed was a cross (or phillips) screwdriver to assemble it.

Once put together it was about 3 feet taller than me and I couldn’t even GUESS the weight of it. It SEEMED like it was about 5 stone as I dragged it up the flight of stairs to the bathroom!

I have been on the Cotswold mailing list for 4 years now and I get regular emails about sales and clearances on their items. As I write this, they currently have 25% off everything on the site - which is a fantastic savings as the shipping on most items is only £4.95.

The prices on the website are fairly good, I have found that the items that are the most expensive are worth it - i.e. the expensive items are solid wood and look handcrafted. The more everyday items are very competitively priced and when you catch a sale, even more reasonable.

The website is worth browsing through if only for decorating ideas alone.