Ever thought of designing your own wall railing? But a custom made railings is going to be expensive right….No is the short answer.
This is a work in progress
It is true that no made to measure railing is ever going to be as cheap as those mass produced cheap railings sold in DIY stores or internet suppliers selling standard size 6ft long railings.
Many affordable made-to-measure companies offer limited designs because greater variety increases production costs. Mainly due to the time spent working on the design of a bespoke railing. However, minimizing design time keeps custom railings budget-friendly. The easy way to reduce design time, is to get you to design your own. It is not as difficult as it seems as long as you follow a few rules.
The sad reality is that you can easy spend an hour, working on a design. Drawing it and emailing to a customer, making a few revisions to the drawing. When the actual railing might only take 2 hours to make in an unpainted version. You can not give away for free one third of your working day, without either charging for the design time. Or increasing the price you charge for a railing to compensate for the lost time. But designing it yourself is going to massively reduce that design time to a point where you can afford to do it for free.
If i told you the above railing design was made from mass produced parts, and would likely cost around £250 for a railing around 1900mm long by 450mm high. Considering most made to measure panels this size, that have a plain design sell for around £200-£230 on the internet.(as Sept 2026), would you be surprised?. But of course price will always vary according to the design. A simpler design would be cheaper and a more elaborate one is going to be more expensive.
If this has sparked your interest please read on, I will try to make the process as easy as possible providing as many examples as possible along the way. But i have to warn you it is quite a long read, you cant teach years of railing design in a few pages on the internet. But at the end of it you should be able to create an individual design that you really like, and you will know exactly how much I would charge for the railings. So no nasty surprises designing something you like, to find it is going to cost a kings ransom.
How it works.
The principle is very simple, take a plain simple railing as your base, add detail to that railing using pre made parts to create a decorative bar. Know the cost of the plain railing and know the cost of the decorative bars you add. Total it up and you have the cost of your railing.
As I said this uses pre made parts, those parts come in a limited number of sizes. So you have to work with what is available. Some of those parts require assembly or should i say welding to form a bar. I have chosen a selection of parts to use. There are other additional options, but the more I add in the more complicated it becomes. These pages are broken down into sections and it get the best out of this, you should ideally read them in order. This keeps it logical and should stop you coming up with an impossible design. Be warned there is thousands if not millions of possible designs.
Permutations
So just as a quick demonstration of why there are so many possibilities. Assume you have a small railing lets say around 650mm long, it will contain 5 upright bars. Working out from the centre, and using it as a line of symmetry Just using a twist bar as your sole piece of decorative design Replacing those plain bars with a twisted one. There are 7 possibilities..
Now if you decided that maybe your preferred a basket rather than a twist, you still end up with 7 possibilities but it would look like this.
The baskets have only replaced the twists replace those baskets with rings, and you get the same 7 designs just with different parts. But start mixing those parts and you start to get more possibilities. mixing the two together gets 12 possibilities.
Using just 2 parts on a small railing with 5 bars gives you 26 possible designs. Adding a third part increases the options even more. With the 9 parts I usually use, there are over 25,000 possible combinations even on such a small railing. And we haven’t even talked about top decorations yet. Plus, there are a few tricks to get even more railing design ideas. To be honest, out of those 26 designs, I would throw away 15. Only 11 are worth serious thought in my opinion. I won’t point them out because everyone likes different things, and I don’t want to sway your opinion.
So if this has got your interest then please keep reading. I will try and keep it as simple and straight forward as possible. There are a lot of examples provided as a guide, so even if it sounds a little to complicated you can always choose one of the examples as your design.
The first thing we should look at is the parts and how they can be used to create a decorative bar.