How to Choose a Cabinet Style

Are you concerned about this topic? You should be! 😉

It is very important if you are planning on enjoying your kitchen for years to come to make the correct choice, compared to if you are planning on selling and are trying to please “the masses”.

The top three factors that should influence your choice are:

– The reason you are doing the renovation

– Your personal taste

– The other elements in your kitchen that you can’t or don’t want to change (countertop, backsplash, floors, etc.)

The reason:

It is obvious that the cabinet style can change the look of the entire kitchen and consequently define the overall look of the entire home.

It should be picked according to your taste, what makes you feel good, what reflects your personality and your lifestyle…but only if you are refacing or remodelling to enjoy your own house for a long time. If you are remodelling or refacing to sell, it’s time to put your personal preferences aside.

If there is a good chance that your house will be on the market within the next 5 years or less, everything should be picked based on what is the hot seller in the cabinet industry, basically what sells the most. It is a good idea to try and find compromise between what sells and what compliments the other elements of the kitchen and the overall look of the house. For example, if a grey slab door is the color and style that sells, but the house is 100 years old with traditional crown moldings, original oak floors and walnut wainscoting, a better match for the style of the house should be found.

Personal Taste:

There is very little that an expert and kitchen designer can say if the homeowner knows what they like. It is about what makes the homeowner happy. However, sometimes a little help could avoid basic errors in choosing the doors just because the homeowner has an extremely passionate desire for a certain door (that does not necessarily match the rest of the home)

A popular situation that I have encountered with the over 3,000 home consultations in the last 10 years, is the homeowner wanting to put a very dark wood kitchen in a small condo with no windows. Understandable the search for elegance, but dark cabinets in a small room is just a plan for disaster…making even breathing a challenge 😉

The Other Elements In The Kitchen:

Countertop, backsplash, floor, wall color and the style on the rest of the house are elements that influence the choice of the cabinet style and colour. Keep in mind that the parameters that we are about to talk about are not written in stone and are just the result of years of successful and not so successful kitchen re-style stories…

Having a granite or quartz countertop installed few years before you go for the kitchen change does not make you excited about replacing it due to the high cost; you probably need to work with it. The safest thing to do is to go with a nice contrast, many times I have seen dark countertop combined with dark cabinets…..they “blend into each other”.

Same story for backsplash, walls and floor; if you are forced to keep them make sure you are complementing the elements with beautiful contrasts.

Avoid busy backsplash if your cabinet style is already ornate, in this case the cabinets are the “prima donna” and failing to keep the backsplash simple will create a bad competition between elements.

Oh…and please, I almost forgot! The one last thing that homeowners feel they have to do that makes me chuckle? Match the cabinets with the kitchen table set….please don’t worry about it. Unless it happens to be a family heirloom that means the world to you ;)..even so your kitchen cabinets don’t need to match your table, you can always cover it with a nice tablecloth…..