Off the Wall Kitchens: Living Without Wall Cabinets

Achieving a workable balance between competing requirements in a kitchen is a large part of what kitchen designers do. For example, all good kitchens provide abundant natural light and ample convenient storage. A lot of the most useful storage is in cabinets attached to the walls of the kitchen. This is, of course precisely where the windows go. So, if a kitchen has a lot of wall cabinets, it cannot have many windows. If it has many windows, it has to do without a lot of convenient wall storage.

Photo: Omega Cabinetry
Large kitchen windows produce a light, airy kitchen but eliminate space for wall cabinets. Wall cabinets are unquestionably useful storage, but with drawbacks. A major disadvantage is that wall cabinets make a kitchen seem smaller by closing in the space at eye level — which is where we subconsciously judge how large the space around us is. The typical rank of identical wall cabinets marching with military alignment along the wall of a kitchen create what is in effect walls within the walls of the kitchen and really close the space in.

Small kitchens in particular can greatly benefit from the perception of a larger room that results from omitting wall cabinets. But smaller kitchens are also almost always desperate for more storage. The smaller the kitchen, the more acute the storage need, and the stronger the temptation to use at least some wall cabinets to meet the need.

So, which way to go. No wall cabinets, lots of windows for a more open, lighter, airier kitchen. Wall cabinets, fewer windows for more storage but a room that seems smaller and more closed in. Hummmm!

Photo: Premier Cabinetry
Well-organized storage. The ideal solution, of course, is a kitchen that combines both: plenty of convenient storage while eliminating most if not all wall cabinets for more light and openness. How to do this is, of course, the problem, but a solvable problem using creative design and the innovative storage solutions that have become available in recent years.

Increasing Storage Efficiency

Eliminating wall cabinets means that the remaining storage in the kitchen has to do double duty. Fortunately, storage efficiency has become a prime focus of kitchen cabinet and accessory providers over the past decade. Many innovations that greatly increase usable storage are widely available and increasingly used by kitchen design professionals to enhance the storage efficiency of kitchens.

The Two Iron Rules of Storage

• Size storage to the things being stored, and

• Arrange storage so that all items are in a single layer with no item hidden behind or beneath another. These allow us to design storage that is convenient, efficient and conforms to the two iron rules of kitchen storage. These rules allow a lot of flexibility in terms of how storage is actually designed. And while no two kitchen designers ever seem to have exactly the same idea about designing storage, there are some basic approaches that are pretty much agreed to by everyone. Here are some of the typical methods we use to enhance the efficiency of kitchen storage so that wall cabinets can be reduced or even eliminated.

Drawers, Not Doors, In Lower Cabinets

Photo: Plain & Fancy Custom Cabinetry
A plate drawer. Custom dividers protect the plates from shifting and chipping. Soft-close drawer guides can also be used to protect delicate china and glassware. In ancient times — about 20 years ago — all lower kitchen cabinets came outfitted with doors and shelves. A modest cabinet had a half-shelf, often Photo: Southern Living
A pullout shelf or tray is just a drawer without the decorative drawer front. adjustable, and a premium cabinet a full shelf. Shelves on lower cabinets do indeed store things, but not very well. Only the first 11" or so of the 22"-deep shelf is actually accessible. The back half may as well not be there. Anything on the back of the shelf is lost storage - you can get to it, but it requires a lot of stooping and bending; searching and moving things around, and maybe even a flashlight.

Obviously the way to make the back of the shelf more convenient and useful storage is to allow the shelf to pull out so the back of the shelf is accessible. This was the birth of pullout shelves which quickly morphed into shallow pullout trays. If you want to get something from the back of the tray, pull it out, get the item, push it back. But first, you had to open the cabinet door (or doors), then close the door when you were done.

Almost immediately kitchen designers realized that a pullout tray is just a form of drawer. Drawers do not need doors in front to hide them, a drawer face will do that nicely and eliminate the bother of opening and closing doors just to get to the drawers within.

Today, just about every kitchen designer worth his or her credentials recommends drawers in place of door/shelf units on lower cabinets.

Fit Drawers With Dividers

Photo: Valendrawers, Inc. Truly innovative drawer dividers by Valendrawers and others make changing drawer usage a matter of rearranging dividers in pegboard to any new configuration you choose. Almost everything can be stored in drawers — shallow drawers for utensils, deep drawers for pots and pans. Plates can be set on edge or stacked in a properly organized drawer. The trick is to customize each drawer to the things being stored. This is where drawer organizers and dividers come into play.

Drawer organizers used to be cut and fitted to the drawer, and once cut and fitted could not be changed. If you wanted to use the drawer to store something else, the existing dividers had to be scrapped and new ones installed. No longer.

Photo: Rev-a-Shelf Pot, pan and lid organizers keep pans and their lids together in one place. Innovative drawer organizer systems using pegboard and movable dividers reduce reconfiguring drawer organization to a simple process of rearranging the dividers in the pegboard base to any new configuration you like. Once we fit and install the Melamine pegboard base, you can arrange the drawer as you prefer as many times as you need to any configuration your need. No further cutting and fitting is required. This makes drawer storage almost infinitely flexible, able to meet your changing storage needs. A well-organized knife drawer keeps knives safely available. Tall dividers are available for deep drawers and short dividers for shallow drawers. We have yet to meet a drawer that this flexible system will not work in or a storage requirement it cannot meet.

For pot, pan and lid storage, we prefer deep drawers with specialized organizers made just for this purpose. Several varieties are available from accessory suppliers, and we make our own. In general these organizers store pots and pans and their associated lids in the same place so that pans and lids stay together for quick retrieval.

Rev-a-Shelf (illustrated above) makes one out of wire for up to 33" wide drawer openings that store pans and lids in the same drawer space. A deep drawer for pans with a shallow pullout for lids is also a common configuration. Many of these are after-market accessories intended for installation in existing cabinets to make them more efficient.

Using Corner Space

One of the challenges of going without wall cabinets is to make use of every possible space in the kitchen that can be adapted to storage. Photo: Rev-A-Shelf The most common corner cabinet storage solution is the two-tier lazy susan in wood, metal or plastic. Drawing: StarCraft Custom Builders Typical blind corner unit operation. To get to the second shelf unit (B), the first shelf unit has to be pulled out and rotated out of the way. Involved and expensive, these are our least favorite corner cabinet storage organizers. The corner where two rows of cabinets come together has potential for excellent storage using any one of several kinds of corner organizers. The most common configuration is a lazy susan.

Lazy-Susan

By far the most common is a lazy-susan turntable. Anything stored in the back of the cabinet can be brought 'round to the front with a little twist of the wrist. But there are some disadvantages. Fitting round lazy susans into square cabinets means that there are dark corners where things that fall off the turntable can get lost. Fortunately, there are a couple of simple solutions to this problem. One is to make the cabinets round to fit the turntable. Another is to fit individual turntables on adjustable shelves — often called "super susan" cabinets. We like this solution better than round cabinets that tend to be flimsy (thick wood does not bend, so thin plys are used — these are usually not very strong.)

There are a lot of different kinds of lazy susan. Some attach to L-shaped cabinet doors so the doors rotate with the turntable. They tend to get jammed up more often than other styles and work best with inset doors. For overlay doors, free-standing units are the better choice. Free-standing turntables can be notched or beveled. The notched style fits L-shaped doors, and the beveled variety fits a 45-degree corner door (the preferred style — it provides more storage).

Photo: Knape & Vogt A fully extended blind corner unit. The cost of this hardware with installation works out to about $100.00 per square foot of storage, making it by far the most expensive corner storage option. Turntables are also made in a variety of materials. The least expensive is the common white PVC plastic product. Metal and wood units are considerably more expensive — especially stainless or hardwood finished to match your cabinets (a total waste of money). Actually, PVC is, in this instance, the better product. It is lightweight, tough, easy to clean, simple to adjust, and cheap. It is unquestionably ugly, but, so what! It's hidden behind your nice cabinet doors, so what does it matter?

Blind Corner Unit

One of the most involved corner storage solutions is the blind corner organizer. This consists of two sets of pull-out shelves, one install behind the other. Pull out the drawer to get to shelves A. To get to halve B, rotate shelves A out of the way which simultaneously pulls the shelves B forward into the opening. To close the cabinet, the process is reversed. If this sounds like a lot of work just to get a box in the back of the cabinet, it is. Rube Goldberg would have loved this gadget. Plus, at $800.00 and more installed, these are the most expensive organizers that we know of.

Corner Drawers Photo: Blum, Inc. V-front drawers specially designed for a corner drawer cabinet. Photo: Plain & Fancy Custom Cabinetry. A drawer bank rotated 45 degrees to form a corner cabinet. You give up a little storage space for much improved storage accessibility.

Our preferred corner storage solution is a simple stack of drawers.

OK, you give up a little storage space in trade for better accessibility. But, to our way of thinking, inaccessible storage is useless storage, so the trade-off is a no-brainer.

A number of drawer manufacturers have come up with clever v-front drawer units just for corners. Cute, but pricey — and unnecessary. Normal drawer stack units rotated 45 degrees work just as well, actually provide more storage, use the space in an otherwise useless corner more efficiently, and, most importantly, cost a lot less to make.

Using Toe-Kick Space

A drawer built into the toe kick provides additional storage possibilities. Cabinets typically sit about 4" off the floor in American kitchens. The area under the cabinets is the toe-kick space. The toe-kick is that indent under your cabinets where your feet go when you are standing at the cabinet. Without the toe-kick, you could not stand comfortably at the cabinet — so all base cabinets have them. In a modest kitchen with 15' of cabinets, there is about 25 square feet of toe-kick space that could be put to some good use. This is equivalent to having three extra drawer cabinets.

In a smaller kitchen where storage is at a premium, this space could be used for pull-out storage trays. A drawer box is built and fastened to the floor, then the cabinets are installed on top of the box. The front of the box is recessed 2-3" behind the face of the cabinets — creating a toe kick recess.

Special latches are often used called "touch-latches". When the trays are pushed lightly with your toe, they spring out far enough so you can pull them out the rest of the way. To close them, push them back with your foot until the latch is re-engaged. Naturally, since the front of the tray is being kicked around a lot, you would probably want to cover it in a mar-resistant material like a Formica® laminate.

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