By Katherine Salant
When I began examining the details of Marcy Vandertuig's gorgeous new kitchen in Onekama, Mich., I was astounded to discover that she had no base cabinets. All the below-counter storage was drawers.Though tract builders have not yet caught up with this trend, I found that Vandertuig's kitchen is far from unique. In recent interviews with three certified kitchen designers from both coasts - Jim Bingnear and Debbie Saling in Washington, D.C., and Jeff Adler in Los Angeles - I learned that many homeowners are taking this route. The reason? A drawers-only storage system can be more precisely tailored to individual household needs and is easier to use than base cabinets.
The biggest plus with the drawers is the convenience, said Bingnear. When you pull a drawer out, you can see everything in it at a glance, and you can easily reach the items at the back. With base cabinets, even the ones with roll-out shelving, you need to move things around to get what you want, then rearrange things before you can push the shelf back in. And if you don't push the shelf in all the way, the cabinet door can crack when you try to shut it, added Saling, who has experienced this twice in her own home.
Another plus with the drawers is that they're easier to open and close than base cabinets, which require you to open both doors before you can pull out the shelves.
Though some clients are initially skeptical that the drawers will meet their storage needs, Saling said they become convinced when she demonstrates that a full set of frying pans and sauce pans will fit in the bottom two drawers of an 18-inch drawer base. Because drawers have so much capacity, she always recommends them for small kitchens.
Another advantage to the drawers: The design can be customized to a degree that is impossible with base cabinets, even in a very large kitchen. For example, one drawer can be allocated to Tupperware, one to sauce pans, one to frying and omlette pans, and one to casserole dishes.
This can be further fine tuned by adding dividers to individual drawers to create smaller compartments. Saling often adds a divider to a 24-inch wide drawer to create an 18-inch wide compartment for sauce pans or Tupperware and a 6-inch wide compartment for tops or lids. This system is especially useful for casserole lids, "often the hardest thing to store."
For the occasional client who wants a kitchen with no wall cabinets, Bingnear has used dividers in drawers to create square compartments for stacking plates or slots for vertically storing them and smaller "stalls" for mugs and cups.
Even when they see the increased utility of using the drawer system, some clients worry that the weight of pots and pans will break the drawer. The affected part would not be the drawer but the drawer glide, and almost all drawer glides are designed to hold 75 pounds, Saling said. "A whole set of pots and pans wouldn't weigh that much."
With a standard drawer glide, you can pull the drawer about three-quarters of the way out, enough so that you can reach to the back. A more expensive full extension glide, however, will enable you to pull the drawer all the way out.
Another distinction between drawer glides is whether they are mounted on the sides or underneath the drawer. The under-mounted type, also an upgrade, adds as much as an inch to the inside width of the drawer, and many designers think that a drawer with this type of glide looks better. If a solid wood drawer with dovetail joints is used, the under-mounted glide makes the jointery detail easier to see.
Though it's possible to get drawer bases as narrow as 12 inches, they're not very useful. The inside width of the drawer itself is often only about 8 inches or less and "it's silly unless you want a bunch of cubby hole drawers for tchotchkes," Adler said. If the counter width for a drawer base goes below 15 inches, he usually specifies a tray divider base cabinet. Even a 15-inch wide drawer base is not that useful, Adler added. He has one in his own kitchen (which he did not design himself) and he can barely fit a plastic flatware divider into it. Whenever possible he tries to have the drawers at least 18 inches wide.
The upper bound for drawer width is 36 inches. If a drawer is wider than that, it can be loaded with more than 75 pounds worth of pots and pans and this could break the drawer glide, Saling said.
Although Bingnear and Saling usually work with custom and semi-custom cabinetry, they also design kitchens with stock cabinets lines that a tract builder is more likely to use, such as Merillat. A kitchen with drawers instead of base cabinets can easily be done with stock-sized drawer bases, both said.
If a tract-builder has never done this, buyers would have to work with his cabinet supplier to redesign the kitchen. Since something different will slow down the builder's installers, buyers would probably have to pay extra for the different layout, even if they used the builder's standard cabinets.
All three designers noted that because the planning of a kitchen with drawers forces the client to think through exactly what's needed, the client is often happier with the end result. With base cabinets, storage specifics do not have to be spelled out so precisely and something can be overlooked. Even with all the utility of the drawers, though, Adler still includes several base cabinets in every design to accommodate the awkward-sized pot or the one or two pieces of large, gourmet type cooking ware that nearly every household eventually accumulates.
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