Help me design a 48" bank of cabinets to look like buffet/hutch

11 years ago

We are finalizing our kitchen layout and ordering cabinets this week. Everything will be the same as we had planned except for an area on the side of the kitchen where I thought the cabinets would be at least 54" wide. After framing and considering door trim, it looks as if there is only 48" available for this cabinet. I would like for it to be a "pretty cabinet" with some open shelves for cookbooks/knick knacks and glass doors for display. I plan to use the area as my coffee station so I would like drawers for all of the acoutrements. I also envision using the lower cabinets for storage of small occasional items - travel mugs, candles, wine opener/stoppers, cake decorating supplies, toothpicks, skewers, etc.

The pic below shows what I had planned, but with losing 6" I don't think there is room for the side cabinets on the upper. Should I do two large doors about open shelves without anything to flank them? What else do you suggest. I have included a few other pics of the kitchen for reference, too. Thanks in advance!( so sorry it is sideways... in photobucket it is turned correctly)

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Long wall run of cabinets:
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Overall layout:
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Butlers pantry:
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Comments (12)

User
11 years ago
Just do a 24" center cabinet size flanked by 12" and the proportions will be fine.
momto3kiddos
Original Author
11 years ago
Are 12" cabinets very practical? I was thinking it would leave about 9" inside frame. I have never used a cabinet that narrow. What do you think?
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liveinseattle
11 years ago
if I were you , I'd do 2 24 cabinet. I found 12" cabinet only useful in the bathroom for little things. Not practical at all in the family room
CEFreeman
11 years ago
I think 12" cabinets are stupid and a waste of space. Perhaps as open or glass shelving?
I will never put another one in the kitchen again. I've removed everyone of them I can and only have 2 left. They're just not functional for me.

I like your drawing. I'm building a 72" one.

Oh! BTW. For a more furniture look, you would need to add feet at the outside corners of your flanking drawers. Furniture couldn't stand on 2 internal feet, righ?
badgergal
11 years ago
To help your cabinets look more like a hutch/ buffet you might also want to consider having the area between the upper and lower cabinet be wood instead of drywall.
For my china/ buffet cabinet, I had the cabinet maker run the wood grain horizontal so that it ran the same way as all the drawers. It could have been made with the grain vertical. Here is how it looks
artemis78
11 years ago
We were going for a hutch look for a 48" stretch too, but found it wasn't really possible to get the look while retaining utility (at least with inset cabinets). You just end up with too many small cabinets. (Our old kitchen had a big 7' buffet cabinet that looked a lot like your drawing, except with open shelves in the middle of the uppers, and I adored it--we only took it out because we were making structural changes that would slice it in two, and we didn't have another 7' stretch of wall to move it to.)

What we ended up with was three equal uppers (16" each, but you could easily do shelves as one of those too--in ours, two are combined as one larger upper but the doors look the same) and then below, we did one 12" cabinet and one 36" bank of drawers. We find this a very useful layout, but you have to be okay with lack of symmetry. (Not an issue with our space because this is the end of a long run of cabinetry, so it worked.) You could also do two 12" cabinets flanking a 24" drawer bank, but I agree that 12" cabinets have limited utility. Ours is for cutting boards and cookie sheets and is perfect for that, but we wouldn't be able to fill two cabinets like that. I'd much, much rather have the extra space in the drawers. One thing we did consider, which might work for you, is a 24" center drawer bank and two 12" drawer-over-door cabinets--gives you more shallow drawer space and then less narrow cabinet space to fill. The major issue if you are doing inset or framed cabinets is that the drawers in 12" cabinets are really, really narrow, to the point of not being very useful.

Here's ours:
allison0704
11 years ago
The top and bottom definitely need to connect in order to be a hutch. I'm sure you've seen my stained pine hutch in the kitchen and the black painted hutch in the hallway between kitchen and garage. Maybe they will give you some ideas. Both were roughly based on pages I had torn out over the years - three different kitchens. Mine are larger than 48" (the black is the smaller of the two) and I think you might need to skip the sides coming down in order to make it function better.

Here is a link that might be useful: kitchen w/2 hutches
User
11 years ago
The thing about only 48" it is that awkward size between only a single cabinet, and using 3. 3 always looks better in a 1/3 to 2/3 or a 1/4 to 1/2 proportion for the cabinets. The 1/3 to 2/3 isn't doable in only 48". You could make the 12 on the sides pullouts. For the uppers, do open shelves for the 12". Do the 24"w base center cabinet deeper, say 27", and the center 24" upper at 15". Then connect them, maybe with brackets under the uppers and not from top to bottom.
User
11 years ago
Here's the 24 flanked with the 12" pullouts like Holly suggested. I think the proportions are fine as long as you do a bit of fiddling with the depth to keep it interesting. I pulled the center drawer cabinet 4" and used a 16" deep center upper with standard depth wall cabinets for the side. The height mimics a 8' ceiling with the center cabinet being 39"=3" of crown. Baseboard molding on the bottom and just simple brackets under the two 12" deep open shelving uppers.
User
11 years ago
Straight on view to see the proportions better.
cookingofjoy
11 years ago
I was collecting pics for a similar space, and I think this thread on coffee stations has a couple of nice images - allison's and bireland's. I think you might like allison's (she has a link to hers, the one posted is the inspiration pic).
http://ths.gardenweb.com/forums/load/kitchbath/msg0523015316865.html

And then here were a couple others I've saved:

shelving between cabinets

Here is a link that might be useful: coffee station thread
chicagoans
11 years ago
I was thinking exactly what badgergirl said: have a panel made for the back of the open area that matches the cabinets. You could also do as she shows in her pictures and have sides instead of corbels for the open area (you'll already have side panels on the top and bottom, so that would become one long side panel on each side.) Or if you don't want it completely closed, the sides could curve in like cookingofjoy's 2nd pic, or if you want to keep the corbels you could mount them on a piece of trim that continues down to the coutertop, just to define the side edges.

Overall, simply having a matching wood back between the uppers and lowers would make it immediately more hutch like IMO. The mullions will be so pretty!