Kitchen cabinet

History

• Pre-WW-I cabinet design. Typical kitchens before World War I used freestanding work tables and a pantry for dry storage. Cupboards were sometimes used in kitchens, though in larger houses dishes were more typically stored in the dining room or butler's pantry. Perishable foods such as milk, meat, and vegetables were purchased daily.
• Post-WW-I industrial era. Increasing interest in household efficiency led to pioneering motion studies of housework in the 1920s by industrial psychologist Lillian Moller Gilbreth. Subsequent improvements in kitchen design set the stage for the familiar built-in cabinetry of the present day. At the time, work surfaces were typically made of linoleum or stainless steel. Improvements in technology eventually made industrial-scale cabinet production possible.
• Post-WW-II cabinet design. In the U.S., countertops of high-pressure laminates such as Formica became popular. Laminates led to the adoption of the seamless flush-surface kitchen design that is common today, though laminates themselves began to be supplanted by solid surface materials, such as stone and quartz. In Europe, built-in cabinets had also been pioneered in the 1920s. With improved materials, the frameless cabinet style, notable for its architectural minimalism reminiscent of Bauhaus design, emerged in European kitchen design and was soon adopted worldwide.
• Post-modern cabinet design trends. Other elements of kitchen design affect the choice of cabinetry. For example, post-modern kitchens tend to be characterized by hardwood floors, earth tones, and bare walls in place of wallpaper which, in turn, affect cabinetry choices. Various trends include the introduction of more expensive options, space-saving measures, a larger number of ovens, thicker countertops , taller base cabinets, honed finishes, taller countertop appliances, undercounter and task lighting, and higher ceilings. While these are general kitchen design trends, they have also influenced cabinetry.
• Kitchens today. Modern kitchen design has improved partly as a result of ergonomic research. Functionality is important; one research study had "anthropological scientists" observing homeowners "interact" with their kitchen cabinets. Kitchens are larger and have more cabinets; some kitchens may have as many as fifty drawers and cabinet doors. New features today include deep drawers for cookware, pull-out shelves to avoid excess bending, sponge trays on the front of sink cabinets, pullout hideaway garbage/recycling containers, pull-out spice cabinets, lazy susans in corner cabinets, vertical storage for cookie sheets, full-extension drawer slides, and drawers and doors with so-called soft-close/positive-close mechanisms enabling drawers to shut quietly, or which shut fully after being pushed only partially. As housing stocks get older, many homeowners face problems with visually unappealing older kitchen cabinets; in such situations, there is a choice to buy new, reface existing, or to strip and refinish existing cabinets. By 2009, there was more emphasis on cabinets designed with environmental factors in mind. So-called "green cabinets" were becoming more popular. As homes in Western countries became more airtight to save on heating and cooling costs, air quality has sometimes suffered as gases which are released from resins as they cure. Resins, organic materials which convert from liquid to solid form, are used to manufacture engineered wood frequently used to build kitchen cabinet carcases can be a factor. According to a recent report:

Considering that North Americans spend a large proportion of their lives indoors, it’s clear why this is a key issue in designing healthy spaces. Additionally, air quality is not a stand-alone problem; rather, every other component of the home can affect air quality. Air quality can be compromised by off-gassing from cabinetry, countertops, flooring, wall coverings or fabrics; by cooking by-products released into the air, and by mold caused by excess moisture or poor ventilation.

• Universal design Some designers have begun to build houses and cabinetry to address the needs of users throughout the human life cycle and among all user capabilities, under a concept called universal design. The United States requires universal design for federally-funded housing, under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Universal design features include easily manipulated handles, low switches, and numerous other innovations.

  Cabinet wood choices

• Cabinet faces. Solid wood remains a popular choice for many cabinet parts, including bases, frames and doors. However, most commercial cabinets have sides, backs and bottoms made of plywood or particle board. Traditional-style solid-wood cabinetry is more expensive and many consumers opt for cabinets that incorporate many particle board or plywood components to reduce costs. Pricing for solid wood cabinet doors depends on the wood species used. For example, teak is more expensive than cherry, which is more expensive than maple, which is more expensive than oak. Similarly, solid wood is more expensive than plywood which, in turn, is more expensive than particle board or similar sheet goods.
• Cabinet body. The cabinet carcase is usually made from plywood or high-quality particle board, particularly for flat sections that do not need to be shaped, such as shelves, cabinet sides, or drawer bottoms. Typical plywood thickness in these applications varies from to . Stiffness and strength are important factors since cabinets are expected to retain their shape over time and avoid bend or sag while continuing to support a heavy load. The best choices for strength are plywood and higher-quality particle board; they also have the benefit of being less susceptible to warping from moisture. Stiffness increases rapidly with shelf thickness; regardless of material choice, a shelf is 73% stiffer than a shelf, even though it is only 20% thicker. Shelves made of some particle board formulations, especially where not reinforced, may sag or deform. Particle board strength and rigidity varies by formulation and is determined by the resin used. Plywood carcases are usually assembled with screws and nails while particle board carcases do not hold screws or nails as well and therefore are typically joined with glue, groove joints, or mechanical fasteners such as confirmat-cam assemblies. Generally, plywood-carcase cabinets are more expensive than particle-board-carcase cabinets.
• Cabinet frames and doors may be fashioned from solid wood, medium density fiberboard, particle board, plywood, or a combination, and may include lamination or a surface coating over these core materials. A floating panel in a door can be hardwood-veneer plywood captured within a solid wood or MDF frame. Solid wood and MDF can be edge-shaped, e.g., to round or pattern the edges of doors, drawer fronts, or face frames. Particle board, once manufactured, cannot be edge-shaped suitably. Plywood cannot be shaped without revealing its veneer core, often considered unsightly, though edge-shaped furniture-grade plywood with thin plies is considered attractive for limited uses. MDF, once shaped, can be coated conformally with flexible veneers such as thermofoil or can be painted. It can also be covered with wood veneer or high-pressure laminate but only if the edge profile is square or approximately so. Today many cabinet doors and drawer fronts utilize an MDF core. Doors and drawer fronts may also be fashioned of particle board surfaced with high-pressure laminate. Natural wood offers its subtle combination of color, grain, pore pattern, variable absorption and smoothness of finish, and variation with viewing angle and lighting condition. The appearance of natural wood can only be achieved with solid wood components or possibly veneer ; as already pointed out, the two approaches can be combined in a single cabinet. Various transparent grain-revealing finishes including shellac, lacquer, varnish, or polyurethane have been devised. A built-up finish may optionally utilize diverse pigments, dyes, bleaches, glazes, or wood fillers that may highlight contrasting colorants. Finishes can be applied by brush or spray and may comprise many separately applied layers. Accordingly, finishes formulated by differing manufacturers do not, in general, exactly match. Distressing the wood cabinets is another finish application and is often done in conjunction with glazes, stains, paints or dyes. This process consists of adding manufactured imperfections to cabinet doors to give the wood cabinets an aged, distressed, old-world rustic appearance. Common techniques include creating wormholes, rasping, dings and dents and sanding through the wood and layers of finish unevenly.
• Trade-off: solid wood versus particle board. Solid wood and plywood are durable and strong, but are more costly and offer less dimensional stability at manufacture than particle board. For cabinets and surface finishes that may sustain damage during long use, serviceability is a consideration. In case of damage, solid wood can be repaired by a qualified furniture refinisher, other than the manufacturer, to achieve a perfect match to the surrounding finish. Veneered MDF and particle board components, if damaged, must be replaced by the manufacturer. If water reaches the core, particleboard especially will swell irreversibly. Tolerances for the use of screw fasteners in particleboard are tighter than for solid wood or plywood, and screws often loosen over time if over-torqued. However, MDF and particle board are good choices where cabinets are well-constructed, will be cared-for, where service life is projected as intermediate, e.g., where the kitchen will be remodeled approximately every 15 years, or where the manufacturer can be relied upon to supply replacement components if needed.

  Cabinet construction

Cabinet carcass

• Face-frame cabinets. Traditional cabinets are constructed using face frames which typically consist of narrow strips of hardwood framing the cabinet box opening. Cabinet carcasses were traditionally constructed with a separate face frame until the introduction of modern engineered wood such as particle board and medium-density fiberboard along with glues, hinges and fasteners required to join them. A face frame ensures squareness of the cabinet front. It also increases rigidity and provides a mounting point for hinges. Face-frame cabinets retain popularity in the U.S. An important distinction between modern and traditional custom-built face-frame cabinets relates to the catalog-selection of cabinet components entailed by mass production. Original custom face-frame cabinets accommodated multiple sections in a single carcass. But stock face-frame cabinets are constructed individually and joined during installation. As a result, modern face-frame cabinets differ in having significantly wider stile materials overall after installation. Two stiles joined as adjacent cabinets result in, effectively, a stile. Wide stiles can interfere with access to the cabinet interior. When base cabinets were typically shelved, this was not much of a drawback. But with base cabinets increasingly being fitted with trays and drawers, the extra stile width results in significantly less access to the cabinet cavity space. This drawback does not pertain to custom face-frame cabinets.
• Custom. Custom face-frame cabinets offer more efficient use of space because double width stiles can be avoided. They also provide far greater flexibility with regard to materials and design, since kitchen cabinet heights, widths and depths can be designed and produced according to the client's specifications. Every aspect of custom cabinetry can be made to specifications, which makes it both the most desirable and the most expensive choice in the majority of kitchen installations.
• Frameless cabinets. Frameless cabinets utilize the carcase side, top, and bottom panels to serve same functions as do face-frames in traditional cabinets. In general, frameless cabinets provide better utilization of space than face-frame cabinets. A preference for frameless cabinet design developed in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s following the devastation of World War II and the increasing cost of lumber. A burgeoning market for reconstructed housing in Central Europe offered a fertile environment for developments in efficient hinge and cabinet designs. Frameless cabinets rely on manufacturing methods that permit the production of modern cabinet hardware and engineered wood products. The intent of the frameless design is to achieve a more streamlined appearance and a more efficient use of space, with ergonomically designed moving components such as drawers, trays, and pull-out cabinets providing better access to interior components. A number of benefits stemming from frameless cabinet design have been successfully applied to face-frame cabinets, such as multiple drawers in base cabinets, full-overlay doors, and cup hinges. With the rise in popularity of European style frameless cabinetry, a significant proportion of the hardware used by U.S. cabinet manufacturers is imported from Europe.

Cabinet details

• Door Mounting. For both face-frame and frameless kitchen cabinets, it is conventional for cabinet doors to overlay the cabinet carcase. Face-frame cabinets allow for various door mounting options. Traditional overlay doors do not abut, allowing a partial view of the face frames when the doors are closed. Full overlay cabinet doors fit closely so that they obscure the face frame when closed. A third and less conventional option for face-frame cabinets is to inset doors into, and flush with, the face frame. Since frameless cabinet doors also fully overlay their carcases, the two types have a similar installed appearance, both may use European cup hinges, and both tend to use decorative door and drawer pulls.
• Space-utilization. Since typical face-frames are wide and frameless side panels, access to the cabinet interior is wider for a typical frameless cabinet relative to a face-frame cabinet. A cabinet accommodates a drawer in frameless construction or a drawer in framed construction. The difference is most significant for narrower face-frame cabinets. Hence, the nomenclature "full-access." Custom face-frame cabinets, which use one stile to frame two cabinet openings, can also accommodate wider drawers comparable to frameless cabinets. Frameless wall-oven cabinetry further saves of wall space as compared to the same wall-oven installed in a face-frame cabinet, Many, if not most, contemporary ovens have been designed with the space-utilization advantage of frameless cabinets installation in mind. The oven is dimensioned, and thermally insulated, to fit within an industry-standard external width cabinet cavity, less two standard cabinet side-wall thicknesses while providing for a small space between the oven box and the internal cabinet wall. In ovens, the bezel is sized to fit the full external cavity width and overlay the cabinet side wall. Such an installation avoids any unused lateral space around the oven.
• Wood options. Frameless cabinets, which exhibit a modern appearance in keeping with the design movement of "minimalism," are typically constructed of particle board, which features a high degree of dimensional stability, adherence to dimensional standards, absence of warping, uniformity, and a lower cost than solid wood and is very strong. Accordingly, the so-called European hinge includes a 35-mm-diameter cup press-fit to a bored recess particularly well-suited to particle board construction. By virtue of the 35-mm "European" cup design, European hinges avoided reliance on screws as a primary mechanism holding the cabinet door to the hinge. Nearly all non-custom framed and frameless cabinetry now use this 35-mm cup design. Plywood and/or solid wood can also be used in frameless cabinet construction, generally at a higher cost.
• Hinge design features. Those European hinges intended for use with frameless cabinets afford a quick-release mechanism enabling a door to be removed and replaced without the use of tools. Such hinges typically afford six-way positional adjustment by screwdriver for door alignment. Some accommodate complex motions to avoid interfering with interior cabinet components while fully overlaying the carcases. Scissors-type articulating hinges support wide-angle non-interfering adjacent doors.
• Inset door face-frame cabinetry. A special, and unconventional, category of framed cabinets is represented by those with inset doors. An inset-mounted cabinet door is fitted to the frame in the same way as a typical room door is fitted to the doorway; such doors fit into a frame when closed. Inset doors require more precise alignment of each door to the containing frame. Further, this alignment must be maintained with use. Upon opening or closing, inset doors are gently braked by the air cushion trapped between the door and frame. This desirable feature is one hallmark of high-quality inset door construction. Frameless or full-overlay face-frame construction can superficially resemble inset construction when doors are designed to fit closely within a cavity formed by surrounding doors, drawers, and/or an adjacent counter top.

  Cabinet doors

• Frames. In the U.S. solid wood frame and panel construction, using either mortise and tenon or cope and stick jointed frames, is traditional, with maple, cherry, oak, birch, and hickory among the most commonly used species. Mortise-and-tenon frames, with their greater strength and permanence, are more costly to produce and less commonly used as compared to cope-and-stick frames. As an alternative, miter joint frames, which may be identifiable by face-surface relief that follows continuously around the frame, have become popular. Miter-jointed frames typically employ embedded metal fasteners to secure frames elements cut at a 45° angle. Captured within frames, panels may be either solid or veneered engineered wood. Laminates, including those designed to resemble hardwood, can typically be identified by a more rounded appearance associated with the minimum bending radii necessarily entailed by the manufacturing process of applying laminate to an underlying substrate. By comparison, solid surfaces, and solid hardwoods in particular, can be milled with more sharply defined corners, edges, or grooves on either a panel or frame.
• Panels. Panels used in frame-and-panel kitchen cabinet doors may be fashioned either of solid wood or covered by paint, veneer, or laminate in which case they are fashioned of engineered wood. The panels are typically not fastened with glue or nails but rather "float" within the frame to accommodate seasonal expansion or contraction of the wood frame.
• Solid-door construction. Doors may be fabricated of solid material, either engineered wood or solid wood. Engineered wood panels may either be used as slabs or may be shaped to resemble frame-and-panel construction. In either case, engineered wood panels are generally painted, veneered, or laminated. Solid wood panels are typically formed of multiple boards of the selected wood species, jointed together using glue and may either be painted or finished. Solid wood construction offers the possibility of refinishing in case of damage or wear.
• Decorative panels. Cabinet doors panels can be used decoratively on cabinet sides, where exposed, for a more finished appearance.
• Glass door construction options. Doors may have glass windows constructed of muntins and mullions holding glass panels. Other designs either mimic the divided-light look of muntins and mullions with overlays, or may dispense with them altogether. Cabinets using glass doors sometimes use glass shelves and interior lighting from the top of a cabinet. A glass shelf allows light to reach throughout a cabinet. For a special display effect, the interior rear of a cabinet may be covered with a mirrors to further distribute light.

  Drawers and trays

Wall oven cabinets

Cabinet finishes

• High-pressure laminates or are made from resin and paper components under high pressure; in contrast, ordinary wood does not sustain such pressures, and can be crushed to less than half its natural thickness in a hand-operated arbor press. The high pressure squeezes the HPL to such a solid density that it becomes highly resistant to damage simply because any utensil or tool striking the HPL will not have a force greater than the force used to form the HPL itself. In effect, the HPL has been dented in advance. HPL can be decorated in any pattern and is applied using contact cement and pressed in place using a "J-roller." It is cut slightly larger than the panel on which it is to be installed and trimmed using a router-like laminate trimmer along the edge. It may also be filed to obtain the final edge. While HPL became prevalent in the twentieth century, since the 1970s the trend has been away from HPL in favor of wood.
• Melamine is a coating for furniture board panels in carcases. Its unique white-in-color chemical formulation helps prevent damage by chemicals and gives it impact resistance comparable to HPL. Melamine coated boards are widely available in home centers for purposes such as shelving.
• Thermofoil is a plastic coating laminate applied to furniture-board. It is typically applied to boards which have been milled, shaped, or routed into a complex profile. While thermofoil can have a unique glossy sheen and have strength and impact resistance almost as much as HPL, it can't be repaired if damaged.
• Paint is usually applied to maple cabinet doors or to MDF with a spray gun as opposed to a paint brush or roller, in order to achieve a smooth coating. Most large-scale cabinet makers apply one or two coats of primer before the paint as well as a protective coat of lacquer afterwards.
• Stain is a water or thinner based dye that allows for the grain of the wood to show through. When it comes to application there are two main categories of staining. wiping stains and spray stains. Wiping stains are sprayed on to the Wood and then wiped off whereas the spray stain is left to dry without wiping. One thing to keep in mind when it comes to staining it would is that the color of the wood also affects the end result. For example, a stain on oak will not be the same color as the same stain on Maple.

  Cabinet hardware

Drawers and trays

Soft close and push to open

• Soft Close is one of the most widely used hardware upgrade, a system where once a door/drawer is pushed to close, a mechanism slows the momentum of the door/drawer, closing it gently and quietly. This system is beneficial in reducing slamming doors, injuries to children and wear and tear on the cupboard.
• Push to Open is another common hardware option, this mechanism allows people to simply push the cabinet door, where a spring-loaded mechanism then opens the door without the need for handles. This option is used in high end kitchens where a clean, handle-less look is desired.

  Specialty hardware

Buying cabinets

• Base cabinets are usually deep and high to accommodate a countertop surface normally above the floor.
• Wall cabinets are usually deep. Their heights are often, for example, if mounted to a soffit. In a kitchen with ceilings, a wall cabinet will leave about of space above the cabinet which can be covered with a crown molding; a full wall cabinet will run straight to the top of the ceiling. Wall cabinets are sometimes called "upper cabinets." The distance from countertop to wall cabinet is usually, but this distance is sometimes less if there is undercabinet lighting. Cabinets can have an open top for displaying ornaments. Ceilings higher than can permit another level of cabinets.

Cleaning cabinets