Foliot Delivers Fully Custom Bedrooms for Every Room at Telephone House

A collaboration between Mezzino and Foliot, the project sought to furnish student bedrooms with beautiful, functional and made to spec furniture right at the heart of Dundee, Scotland. Neighboring Abertay University and a short walk from the University of Dundee, the building now stands poised to welcome students for the 2026 academic year.

A building of many rooms

Telephone House has been given a new life in the heart of Dundee, and it is anything but cookie-cutter: with 422 bedrooms spread across seven studio types and six cluster-flat layouts, it was anything but standard. For a furniture maker, a building like this is a real test: no single room repeats often enough to lean on one standard package, and every piece has to fit its room precisely while being consistent in quality and aesthetic, from the most compact studio to the larger shared-flat bedrooms.

Every piece made to spec

Foliot did not pull the Telephone House furniture from an “off-the-shelf” catalogue. Every bedroom piece was designed and built to spec, sized to the exact dimensions of each room type across the building. Beds, desks, wardrobes and storage were engineered to make the most of roomsrooms, so students get usable, well-proportioned spaces. 

Handling that much variety across 422 rooms is a genuine engineering and production challenge, and it is one Foliot is built to meet. Because the company is vertically integrated, with design, engineering and production all under one roof, it can take on fully custom work at scale without losing its footing on quality, cost or timing. Telephone House put that capability to the test across dozens of distinct room configurations, and the result is a clear demonstration of what custom manufacturing looks like when it is handled end to end.

Custom but competitive

Custom work is often assumed to carry a premium, but that was not the trade-off here. For Mezzino, two factors weighed heavily in the decision to work with Foliot: price and carbon footprint. Foliot met both while still building every piece to spec. The furniture is made in Canada, where the company's Québec operations run on the province's hydro grid and its engineered boards are produced from recycled wood fibre. The result is a furniture package that holds up on cost and on sustainability at once, without asking the operator to give up the fit and finish that custom work provides.

Built for the student cycle

Student dwellings are among the hardest-working interiors anywhere. With a yearly turnover and rigorous use, operators are faced with the reality of frequent replacements. Foliot accounts and builds for that reality, using reinforced construction, durable finishes, and backing up its pieces with an industry-leading warranty and parts-replacement program that ensures outstanding whole-life value of its furniture. 

A growing presence in the UK — challenges overcome in delivering across the ocean

Telephone House is Foliot's largest UK contract to date, and a marker of the company's growing work across the United Kingdom. It shows the model in practice: furniture designed and made in North America, built to the specific needs of a project, and delivered to a residence an ocean away. For student housing operators weighing quality, cost and sustainability at the same time, Telephone House is a project worth watching, and a sign of what Foliot can bring to the next one.

For Foliot, it allowed showcasing a growing expertise in a market that demands new adaptations:

- New ways of reading plans 

- Flat pack delivery

- Rules and regulations concerning container deliveries

- Thinking outside the box and finding new tools to increase efficiency

Conclusion

With the project now almost complete, Telephone House stands poised to welcome its first students for the 2026 academic year in beautiful, sustainable, and durable bespoke furniture meant to support their learning endeavors. 

Some snippets of the Telephone House project: