I've been looking for a linen armoire for several months. I considered a number of online and retail furniture options, however I had a limited budget for this purchase. The concept of $1800 to house linens does not make a great deal of sense. I considered another product from Wayfair.com who offers on site assembly services for a nominal fee. However, the Wayfair.com product was really over our budget. I made the selection of the Aristo based on a number of reviews which considered it a quality pre-fab furniture piece for the price.
The reason I'm rating the Aristo Armoire 3 stars is as follows:
1) Don't kid yourself into believing you can assemble this product with a regular Phillips scew driver as stated in the instructions; make sure you have a power screwdriver and a tool which can prep the wood for the installation of screw holes--my husband used a small screw driver for certain pieces that did not come with pre-drilled holes;
2) The instructions and the pre-drilled holes of the product don't always coincide; for example, the two side panels of the upper cabinet were supposed to have two holes drilled toward the FRONT of the panels to support door hanging hardware. The actual panels that arrived had the mounting hinge holes drilled in the REAR of the cabinet (pictured). This meant that you had to create the hinge holes toward the front of the side panels to install the hinges were no holes existed in order to hang the doors. Scrutinize the instructions relative to the actual pieces which arrive to insure you catch errors like this before you are 3/4ths of the way through the assembly process.
3) Hanging the doors, assembling and inserting the drawers : due to our issues with the missing drill holes for the door hanging hardware, the experience of hanging the doors was frustrating. My husband and I worked on this project together; we had to create holes in the cabinet panels to hang the hardware It took 2-3 tries to hang each door. Additionally, we found inserting the drawers using the glider brackets was very tricky. The instructions will show you how to install the brackets on the drawers, however, we discovered the four drawers are not all interchangeable with the lower frame drawer openings. We had difficulty extracting the drawers in a couple of instances while we were completing this project. Watch out for scratches on the surfaces!
4) Drawer brackets -- make sure you have the correct drawer bracket parts in the correct position (two holes on top, rollers on bottom) when you install the drawer brackets on the vertical piece separating the two drawer sections; we had to remove the brackets and re-install them. The instructions are not clear on that aspect of the assembly. Ugh...
5) Surface scratches - did I say, watch out for scratches during assembly? Watch out and insure you protect the product exterior surfaces ; the dark brown color will easily show scratches. I will have to invest in a furniture scratch remover for a couple of the drawer faces which my husband and I were struggling with inserting in the proper openings as outlined in #3 above.
All in all would I do this over again?--probably not without a professional who could have knocked this out in a few hours with power tools. My husband and I are by no means expert woodworkers...far from it. He's the one who talked me into working on this as a family project--yes, we are still married and have added the Aristo armoire to our home.