Match Your Cabinets with Other Kitchen Furniture

When planning and designing your kitchen cabinets, space and functionality will no doubt be your primary concerns. However, attention to style and material will also need to be included in your designs to ensure that you are satisfied with the finished effect.

Your cabinets need to reflect the overall feeling and style of your kitchen. For example, if you are trying to create a traditional kitchen, you may want to use medium to dark woods. The cabinet facades need to match or complement other pieces of kitchen furniture in order to create a harmonious overall effect. French country style cabinets would reflect a more worn, rustic, homely feel, while mission style kitchens would benefit from rugged, square-bodied, dark wood cabinets.

If your style is more contemporary, you may be looking for a minimalist design in chrome, stainless steel or bright colored laminates. These cabinet designs have sleek, clean lines and glide seamlessly into each other. You may want to consider a matching cabinet door front to your refrigerator and dishwasher to maintain the overall effect.

Whilst stainless steel, has been the material of choice for designer cabinets in recent years, the natural wooden look is making a comeback. Complemented by granite counter tops and slate floors, modern natural wood cabinets can look fantastic. Such cabinets will feature natural patterns and characteristics, such as knots, quilting, a birdseye pattern, and fiddleback or spalting effect.

There are a wide variety of woods that make perfect kitchen cabinets, from hard woods such as Maple, Walnut, Cherry and Madrone, a Californian native, to soft woods including Alder and the Australian Lacewood. Lighter varieties of wood include pine or birch, whilst if you seeking a dark wood finish you might consider Burl or Bloodwood. If you have very specific ideas about your perfect cabinet design, it may be worth getting the cabinets made from untreated wood, which can then be stained, painted, stenciled or etched to suit your own tastes.

When planning your cabinet layout, you will want to consider inner storage space, the required height of wall mounted cabinets above your splash-back, and where other items in the kitchen will be located, to ensure your cabinets are conveniently placed as well as aesthetically pleasing. Ensure you can reach the top shelves and that your cabinets are deep enough to accommodate all your pots and pans without completely taking over your kitchen. Make sure you have plenty of space above your counter tops so you are not constantly colliding with wall mounted cabinets while working on your kitchen surfaces.

Jerry Blackburn is publishing largely for http://www.kitchencabinetstips.com , a web publication covering information on furniture . His contributions on kitchen designs are found on http://www.kitchencabinetstips.com/designs.html .