Whether you’re in the business of selling or installing cabinets or a consumer looking for cabinets for a kitchen or bathroom, it’s important to understand the basic styles that make up your cabinet options. Professionals often have a hard time explaining this to end users, and homeowners looking to update a kitchen or bathroom become confused by the stylistic jargon used to describe design elements.
For example, a contractor will know exactly what is being described when someone says ‘traditional overlay cabinet’, but most homeowners will have no idea what that means. So it can be helpful for everyone if the basic overlay layouts are explained more clearly. This can help the contractor explain this to their clients and also to homeowners looking to find an overall design concept.
frameless cabinets
As the name describes, these are cabinets with no ‘frames’ around the items. The doors sit directly on the front edge of the cabinet box, and the doors and drawers will also run all the way to the edge of the counter. In other words, there are no ‘frames’ surrounding any of the cabinet design elements. It gives a beautiful and simple look, but can be difficult to install because frames usually allow a bit of tolerance for the fudge factor.
Front Frame Cabinets
One of the most common styles of kitchen décor, these cabinets have about 1-1/2-inch surrounds around each cabinet element. Doors and drawers will overlap this frame. The front frame cabinet design is the general style for four common overlays:
Full Overlay Cabinets
These are halfway between the frameless and front frame look, with the front frames covered almost entirely by the door or drawer overlays. This concept is very common in contemporary and country house designs. Typically 1/4 to 1/2 inch of the cabinet frame will show through the overlaps.
Traditional Overlay Cabinets
This design allows most of the frame to show through, typically about an inch, between doors, drawers, etc. These are common in many design styles, such as rustic and country/traditional, as well as those designs that do not require handles on the front of the cabinet, typically requiring finger grooves on the inside of the doors and the top of the cabinet. top of the drawers.
Modified Overlay Cabinets
This is kind of a middle ground between full and traditional overlay layouts. Typically you’ll have cabinet doors and drawer sides nearly touching in a full overlap style, but the tops will show plenty of frame in a more traditional look. Finger grooves are often added to the top of drawers and cabinets (or to the bottom as needed for reach) for a handleless look. This style is common in rustic, modern, and mid-century looks.
Overlay Cabinets with Flanged
This is a common design element, but it can also be used as a general design concept. Flanged overlays are drawer and door fronts that have a recessed groove in the edge of the door/drawer front to allow part of the thicker front to rest on the cabinet frame and the remainder to be recessed. This gives it a very clean look that is becoming popular nowadays. It is common in retro designs such as Shaker, Colonial, and mid-century.
built-in cabinets
These aren’t as popular as they once were, due to both their sometimes overly simplistic design appearance and their cost, but built-in cabinets are still a common request, especially in clean, modern designs. Inserts are cabinets where the entire front face is flush. In other words, doors, drawers, etc. go all the way into the frame so the entire front of the cabinet is smooth. This is very difficult to achieve because there is almost no tolerance for measurement errors. However, when done right, it can be beautiful.
Those are the most common cabinet style types that most people will encounter.