By Katherine Salant
Seventy or 80 years ago, kitchen cabinetry consisted almost entirely of drawers and cabinets. Today's cabinetry includes an array of tempting gizmos, but drawers and cabinets still deliver the most utility, and recent refinements make these basics even easier to use, three certified kitchen designers from the Washington, D.C., area and Los Angeles said in recent interviews.A drawer is a drawer is a drawer, but using under mounted drawer glides adds as much as one inch to the interior width. Multiplied across an entire kitchen, it's a significant increase in storage capacity, observed Beltsville, Md., designer Debby Saling. When drawer glide extensions are added to large drawers, they can be pulled out all the way and large items in the back can be easily lifted in and out.
Base cabinets are still base cabinets, but roll out trays have vastly increased storage capacity and made these easier to use. Instead of having to take everything out to get the pot at the back, you just pull out the tray and grab it. The storage capacity is greater because each tray is the full depth of the cabinet; in a traditional cabinet, the shelves are fixed and the upper one is only half the depth of the cabinet.
The roll out trays have proved to be so useful and flexible that tall cabinets with roll outs have all but replaced the swing-out chef's pantry so popular in the 1980's, all three designers said. The swing-out units have shelves that can be loaded on either side, plus shelves mounted in the rear of the cabinet and on the doors. Clients complained that the shelving system wasn't flexible enough for the varied sizes of goods being stored, they wanted to be able to see things at a glance instead of having to swing out one or two units to find that errant can of tomato sauce, and items stored on the doors often flew off whenever the cabinet was opened. Not only do the roll out trays solve all these problems, they're also much less expensive, Bethesda, Md., designer Ronda Royalty said.
The sides of the roll-out trays are usually only two or three inches high, so that everything on a shelf can be easily seen. When ordering custom cabinets, which can be made to any size, however, Royalty watches her clients prepare a meal before finalizing this dimension. "If they tend to yank things, I make the trays deeper to keep things from flying off. And if liquor and wine bottles are being stored in the cabinet, I make a much deeper tray with dividers to keep bottles from clanging against each other."
A base cabinet housing two hampers on glides is the best and simplest solution for trash and recycled items, and all three designers said they routinely specify it. Another cabinet with a newspaper collector can be added, but Los Angeles designer Jeff Adler said he rarely suggests it because in most kitchens "you only have so many cabinets and it's not a good use of the space." Trash compactors were hot in the 70's and 80's, but they're "close to being history now," he added. "They get smelly and disgusting and we observed a high breakdown rate."
The one place in the kitchen where a souped-up, gizmo-laden cabinet is appropriate is a blind corner condition, Adler said. "Blind corner" refers to the area under the counter where the two legs of an L-shaped counter intersect; it cannot be accessed unless a special cabinet is used. The oldest and cheapest solution is a cabinet with a fixed shelf and a door at one end. In many cases, the only way to retrieve the pots in the back is to crawl in with a flashlight.
The classic solution to this predicament is a lazy-susan cabinet with two shelves that rotate around a metal pole. This type of cabinet is comparatively large, limiting the other types of cabinets that can be used, and some designers think the pole takes up too much space. Functionally, both Saling and Royalty cautioned that light things such as cereal boxes and Tupperware can easily fall off a lazy-susan shelf and get caught. Heavier objects like casserole dishes and mixing bowls are more suited to it, they both said.
In some situations, especially small kitchens, Royalty uses a newer type of lazy-susan with half moon-shaped shelves. These are rotated out and then pulled forward, so that everything on the shelf is easy to reach. This type of cabinet is also more compact, giving a designer more flexibility in choosing the other cabinets and drawers to go with it.
Adler's choice of blind corner cabinet could have been designed by Rube Goldberg. When the cabinet door is pulled straight out, two large wire trays attached to it are accessible. Swinging the door with trays to the side pulls forward two more shelves that were hidden in the corner. Referred to by many in the cabinet business as "the miracle corner," the swinging tray mechanism is made by Hafele, a German company, and used by a number of custom cabinet makers in the US.
Kraftmaid, a semi-custom cabinet line, makes a less expensive and less sophisticated version of the miracle corner. A wood pantry unit pulls out and swings to the side. To access the two shelves in the blind corner, the user has to reach in and pull them forward.
For narrow spaces that would otherwise have been covered over with a fixed filler strip, a number of cabinet lines now offer three- or six-inch-wide pull-outs. Though an intriguing concept, the designers gave these mixed reviews. The 3-inch wide pullouts with narrower 1-1/2-inch wide shelves are meant for spice storage, but Adler said that most of his clients prefer to keep spices in a tiered drawer or in a wider pullout that would also hold larger items frequently used in a cooking area such as cooking oil, flour, sugar and even paper towels.
Adler uses a wider, 10-inch pull out most often as an angled transition piece between a standard 24-inch depth base cabinet and an oversize 28-inch deep commercial range.
When clients want a refrigerator door with wood panels and there's no place to put messages, Saling uses a tall pull-out filler unit with a peg board/message center.
Appliance garages for small appliances are still popular, but further refinements have made these more useful as well. Saling and Royalty put outlets in the rear of the garage compartment, so that the chef only has to pull the appliance out to use it. Rather than a slatted, sliding tambour door, Adler uses two doors that swing open so that no space inside the compartment is lost to the opening mechanism, and larger items can be stored.
Despite the many advances in cabinetry, however, clutter continues to bedevil designers as much as it does homeowners. Saling has tried placing a base cabinet and pigeon-hole wall unit by the door to the garage to catch the flow as it comes in the house, but this often ends up being "a sore eye catcher." The unfortunate truth, she said, is that "no matter how many catch-all drawers you put in a kitchen, there's always more junk."
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