Materials guide
Egger board textures: the part of your wardrobe you actually touch
Nearly every wardrobe conversation starts with colour. Oak or white. Grey or something darker. Hardly anyone asks about the texture, which is odd, because the texture is the bit your hand lands on every morning.
We use Egger boards constantly at Urban Wardrobes. Carcasses, interiors, shelving, drawer boxes, and on a lot of projects the doors as well. What surprises most customers is how many surface options sit behind a single colour.
Every Egger board carries two codes, not one. Take H1180 ST37. The H1180 is the decor, the printed image, in this case Halifax Oak. The ST37 is the texture pressed into the surface. Swap the second code and you have changed the furniture. Same oak, different piece entirely.
The swatches below are all photographed in the same grey. Egger do that on purpose so you read the surface instead of the shade, and it is genuinely the most useful way to look at them.
Smooth and matt finishes
No grain, no direction. These go on plain-colour boards where you want the surface to sit quietly and let the shape of the wardrobe do the work. Most wardrobe interiors we build are one of these four.
SemiMatt
Completely flat and untextured, closest thing Egger make to a painted panel. A little more sheen than a true matt.
Smoothtouch Pearl
A fine mini-pearl grain with medium sheen. Tough, and it hides handling marks far better than anything flat.
Smoothtouch Matt
Velvety, fully matt, no direction to it. One of the most widely used textures Egger make, and our default for interiors.
Smoothtouch Velvet
Very low gloss, fine and even. Quiet under bedroom lighting and easy to keep clean.
Woodgrain textures
Here the surface has a pore structure, but it runs across the whole board rather than tracking the printed grain underneath. You feel wood. You just do not feel that wood. For most projects that is plenty, and these boards are usually cheaper and quicker to get hold of than the synchronised ones below.
Deepskin Rough
Deep, coarse and fully matt. Made for rustic oak and walnut decors where you want the board to feel unfinished in a good way.
Omnipore Matt
Irregular pores of varying depth spread across the whole sheet. Soft to touch, and it rewards looking at closely.
Deepskin Excellent
Cut floret sections mixed with linear areas, plus a matt-against-gloss interplay that catches the light as you walk past.
Deepskin Linear
A deep brushed finish with strong directional grain. Bold on a tall run of doors, and very good on larch and pine decors.
Feelwood: grain you can actually feel
These are the synchronised ones, embossed in register. The texture is pressed to line up with the printed grain, so where you see a knot, your fingers find a knot. It is the difference people notice in the showroom without being able to say why.
Each Feelwood texture is tied to specific decors. ST37 goes with the Halifax Oaks, ST40 with the Casella Oaks, and so on. You cannot mix and match freely, which is worth knowing before you fall in love with a combination.
Feelwood Nature
Knots and plank joints you can run a finger along. Sandblasted character, closest to a sawn board.
Feelwood Vintage
Weathered, reclaimed-timber character with the wear physically present. Divisive, and brilliant in the right room.
Feelwood Brushed
Deeply brushed, entirely matt, open grain. Reads like timber that has had the soft fibre worked out of it.
Feelwood Rift
Rift-cut cracks and grain lines you can feel, matched to Halifax Oak. Probably the most specified oak combination in UK bedrooms.
Feelwood Pinegrain
Conifer grain with alternating matt and shine, giving a soft pearl effect. Scandi projects usually land here.
Feelwood Oakgrain
The newest of the family. Matt in matt, pores that are there under your hand but never shout. Closest a board gets to oiled veneer.
PerfectSense lacquered boards
A different product to the rest of this page. These are lacquered rather than textured, and they are the boards that come closest to a sprayed door. They also cost meaningfully more, so we tend to use them on door fronts only rather than throughout a wardrobe.
PerfectSense Matt
Warm, silky, deeply matt, with an anti-fingerprint coating that earns its keep on a dark colour.
PerfectSense Gloss
Deep, mirror-like reflection. It bounces daylight around a small bedroom, and it shows every fingerprint. Both of those are true.
Specifying your project
What texture of decorative board can we use for your project?
Short answer: almost any of them. The longer answer is that the right one depends on where the board sits, how much daylight the room gets, and who is opening the doors. Here is how we usually steer it.
Wardrobe interiors and shelving
ST9 or ST15. Matt, calm, no direction to the grain, so shelves cut from the same sheet never look mismatched. This is where the majority of our board goes.
Plain-colour door fronts
ST9 for matt, ST2 if the room takes a beating. That pearl grain on ST2 disguises handling marks around handle positions, which matters in a family house.
Oak and walnut doors
ST37 or ST40. If the budget stretches to a synchronised texture, spend it here. On a full-height run of doors it is the single thing people comment on.
Scandi and lighter schemes
ST38 or ST28. Softwood grain with a light pearl effect. Works well with pale walls and reads warm rather than clinical.
Small or north-facing bedrooms
PG PerfectSense Gloss, used carefully. A gloss run opposite a window genuinely opens the room up. We would not put it on a child's wardrobe.
Dark colours anywhere
PM PerfectSense Matt. Anything deep in colour and flat in finish shows fingerprints. The anti-fingerprint lacquer is the fix, and it is worth the money on charcoal or navy.
Period and rustic rooms
ST10, ST32 or ST36. Deep, open, honest surfaces that sit properly next to old floorboards and original joinery.
Commercial and rental fit-outs
ST2 or ST9. Hard-wearing, easy to source, easy to match again in two years when a panel gets damaged. Availability matters more than drama on these jobs.
Two things worth knowing before you choose
- Texture and decor are sold as a pair. Not every colour comes in every texture, and the synchronised Feelwood boards are locked to specific decors. We check availability before we quote, never after.
- Lead times vary. Common combinations sit in UK stock and land within days. Less common ones can add two to three weeks, which is the kind of thing worth knowing at design stage rather than the week before your fitting date.
Common questions
How do I read an Egger board code?
Two parts. The first code is the decor, which is the printed image: H for woodgrains, U for plain colours, F for materials and stone effects. The second code is the texture, ST or PM or PG. So U999 ST9 is a black board with a velvety matt surface, and H1180 ST37 is Halifax Oak with rift-cut grain you can feel.
Does the texture change the price?
Yes, though less than people expect. Standard textures like ST9 and ST2 sit at the base board price. Synchronised Feelwood boards carry a modest premium. PerfectSense lacquered boards are the real step up and can roughly double the material cost of a door front.
Can I mix textures in one wardrobe?
You can, and we often do. A matt ST9 interior behind Feelwood oak doors is a sensible, common combination. What we would avoid is mixing two strong grain textures on surfaces that meet, because the eye reads it as a mistake rather than a choice.
Can I see and feel the samples before deciding?
Yes, and honestly you should. Photographs of texture only get you so far. We keep the boards we work with most at our Chiswick showroom, and our designer brings samples to site visits.
Not sure which finish suits your room?
Tell us the room, the light it gets and roughly what you had in mind. We will narrow it to two or three boards worth touching rather than sending you a catalogue of two hundred.
Or get a project estimate if you would rather start in writing.
Texture photographs are EGGER's own surface images, shown in a single neutral colour so the structure reads clearly rather than the decor. EGGER, Feelwood, Deepskin, Smoothtouch, Omnipore and PerfectSense are trademarks of Fritz EGGER GmbH & Co. OG. Texture availability and decor pairings change with each EGGER collection, so we confirm current stock at quotation stage.
