Special Purpose Kitchen Cabinet Types

Every kitchen will need cabinets that are made for specific purposes and locations, as well as regular base and wall cabinets. Here’s an overview of what the possibilities are.

If you will be building a L, U or G shaped kitchen, then you’re going to have at least one corner in your base cabinets. Corners can be awkward to access, but there are several ways to improve access.

• Access from the other side: if the corner backs on to another room, perhaps because it’s part of a peninsula, then the hard-to-reach corner can open into that other room.
• Lazy Susan fixtures of several kinds are available. These need a cabinet which is equal in length on its two sides, and often has a door set diaginally across the corner.
• Similar to Lazy Susans, kidney- or half-circle shaped shelves can open out through a single door and give access to a large portion of the interior.
• Complicated wire pull out fittings can allow you access to almost the whole inside space, but need space beside the door to open up, and are quite expensive.
• Plain “blind corner” bases with no fancy fixtures give you access to the area immediately behind the door, but getting into the corner area is a struggle.
• A bank of drawers can extend diagonally back into the corner, with faces either flat or shaped like a V. You lose two triangles of space beside the drawers, though.
• A cab similar to that used for a Susan, with a bifold door but no interior fittings, is another option but also hard to access.
• Corner wall cabinets are also available to improve access, including those that fit diagonally across the corner, and some which include lazy susans.

Range hoods come in a variety of shapes and types. Some are intended to stand alone above the range, with no cabinetry attached to them. Others attach below a high wall cabinet. Others come in teh form of a liner intended to have cabinetry built around them which can be extremely fancy and impressive, including columns, corbels, and giant hearth-like structures with storage and lighting built in.

If you have a standalone range, then your cabinets will simply stand to either side of it. However, drop in and slide-in ranges require a specialty cabinet to support them. Cooktops which are not part of a range drop diretly into a countertop: these sometimes need space in the cabinet below them for mechanical or electrical components so that a drawer can’t be placed below the counter. Others will allow a shallow drawer.

Sinks come in various types which need different cabinets:

• Standard counter-mounted (undermount or dropin) sinks just need a cabinet with a plain front or sometimes a dropdown front where the top drawer normally is. You’ll need to make sure that the width of your cabinet allows for the width of the sink you’ve chosen, especially if you have a multi bowl sink or one with attached drainboards.
• Sinks which take up the entire depth of the counter, like some sinks with drainboards, need a similar cabinet to 1 but they will have a different attachment method since they do not attach to the counter.
• Apron sinks (farmhouse or Belfast sinks) in any material need a cabinet which is cut away at the front to make space for the apron. Metal sinks like this are manufactured to close tolerances, but some fireclay sinks are handmade and may vary by 1/4″ in any dimension:  the sink cabinet in this case has to be custom-adapted, if not custom-made, and scribed to fit exactly round the front of the sink.

Some fridges are made to be completely built in to cabinets, and these obviously need a special cabinet. But even standalone fridges can be surrounded by cabinets to reduce the huge look of them and to integrate them into the kitchen. You need to consult the manufacturers instructions to find out how much free space must be left behind, to the sides, and on top.

Side panels are often used to disguise the sides of the fridge: base and wall cabinets can be butted up to these. Cabinets over top of the fridge are often supported by the side panels, or open shelves can be used. Upright storage for cookie trays etc is a particularly good use of the space above the fridge. The side panels can be plain sheets (plywood, edged and painted or stained to match the cabinets, or melamine coated sheets), or they can be something more elaborate made to match the cabinet doors. If you have a side panel which doesn’t have cabinets butted up to it, it can be a good place for a bulletin board or chalkboard.

While dishwashers are often installed in what amounts to a simple space left between cabs under the counter, you can use a special cabinet to raise the dishwasher several inches to a foot off the floor. This can make it much easier to load and unload, especially if you have back or leg problems. Of course, the counter above the dishwasher will be higher too: you could install wall cabinets directly on top to be used aS a pantry, or use the raised counter for display.

Built-in wall ovens need a special cabinet with an opening that matches the exact measurements of the oven. Be very careful here: while there are “standard sizes” for wall ovens, they are approximate, and the actual size of ovens varies from one make and model to another.

A custom cabinet allows you to adjust the oven height to be exactly right for you. Before you order, try mocking up the oven at the height you plan to use and see how easy it is to open the door, see inside, and put things in and out.

Many appliances nowadays can be “integrated”: that is, they are the same depth as the cabinets and they can have a custom panel attached to the front which exactly matches the cabinet doors. This can make the appliances disappear so well that people unfamiliar with your kitchen may have trouble finding the fridge!

While a walk-in pantry is what many people would like to have, it’s not always possible to fit one in, and that’s when pantry cabinets come into their own. While they are often full height, they can also be base or wall cabinets. What they all have in common, though, is interior fittings which allow packing as much as possible into the available space while still making it all easily asccessible. The main ways of doing this are:

• Pull-outs (where you pull out the door and the shelves all come out with it, and you access them from the side
• Roll out shelves that come out individually and are accessed from the front, but again give you full access right to the back of the shelf
• Swing out sections, each with shallow shelves built into it.

These short cabinets are meant to go over the top of the fridge or the range hood. They often need to be modified to fit around ducting for range hoods, and are hard to access unless you are tall or use a ladder. Fridge top cabinets can be full depth, which makes them easier to reach.

As you can see, there’s a huge range of special cabinets available. Make sure you consider everything available when you’re planning your kitchen, so that you don’t miss any opportunities to maximise space, looks and function.