Hopefully someone with inset cabs can chime in here. I have two thoughts. A12" cab leaves you very little space inside to store much. What will you store there?

Second, by putting more cabs in that 42" of width, you're losing more storage space than if you had less. Each cab frame takes up usable interior space. The more cabs you have, the more frames you have. Hope taht makes sense.

Ok three thoughts. Third, think about the door widths of the cabs. Two doors in a 42" cab means two 21" doors. Some people don't mind wide doors like this, others think that's too wide.

Not much help, huh? ;)

I hate stiles!! I have them right now, because we are 11 days away from demo, and cannot WAIT to get rid of those stupid stiles. 42" wide seems so great, but really you can't put wide platters or anything long in there without some measure of difficulty because it's blocked. What did you plan on storing in those cabinets? I would rather do one of the following ideas:
1. 21" wide next to 21" wide
or
2. 30" wide next to 12" wide
or
3. 24" wide next to 18" wide

I think the third one is what I would pick, if it were my kitchen. Maybe if you planned on storing smallish items in the 42" wide cabinets, you wouldn't mind stiles.

Can you beef up the horizontal parts (shelves, base and top) by doubling the thicknesses of each, or adding additional supports like cleats along the back and sides, and maybe a stiffener along the front? This is the usual solution when building bookshleves that have to span a larger distance. You might need to added additinal hanging points, too. Technically there's no reason you can't do it ezxcept that it's not standard - and there's the door width issue. The kind of solutions I'm proposing shouldn't cost anywhere near as much a doubling the price of the cab order.

If you were OK with the wider doors (some people don't like them) then this soltuion might work for you. Remember the 21" width of an open door doesn't start at the wall, but at the face of the cab, maybe 13" from the wall so a 21' door at right angles would stick 34 inches from the back edge of the counter top. If you happened to be planning 30" deep coounters (a good idea if you can swing it), it might not seem too much. If you want to test it, you can attach some cardboard to an existing upper door and see how it feels.

HTH

L

Just for comparison, I have a 14" [outside measure] cabinet on the side of my hood
and store mixing bowls and casseroles and pie plates on the shelves in it.
There isn't a lot of extra room. The 12" might be a little tight.

Are your cabinets dark stained or white painted? White tends to look worse with a style.
Well, more 'vintage'. Stained it fades into the wood grain and you won't notice as much.

What is your reason for preferring the stile style?

Hate stiles! HATE them. Actually, have decided I don't like face frames too much either.

I think it is okay in cabinets with smaller items but for bigger stuff...pain in the butt (no pun intended). However, if you have a lot of drawers on your lowers, then maybe it would not be such a big deal if big stuff was going in drawers.

I have stiles and have never even noticed them one way or the other, they don't seem to bother us at all. But I am extremely partial to inset cabinets, and stiles and frames just go with the territory as part of what makes inset so pretty.

It all depends on how you plan to use these specific cabs: will you put ginormous platters or casseroles in them? (We keep our huge items elsewhere.)

My KD originally had 2 42" wall cabinets on either side of the range. That is the only wall in my kitchen with uppers and though the space would be nice, I didn't want such large doors. I also have inset cabinets.

I opted to go with the 30" and 12" cabinet setup instead. The 12" cabinets are small, but still useful.

Apologize for my question--I did not read carefully. I see your problem.

We have uppers that are only 20.5 across the front on the outside. I sure wouldn't want any narrower cabs--these fill up very fast and we end up opening two or three when looking for something while working at range. Our cabs have very hefty construction--if the side panels were thinner we'd have another inch inside the cab I bet. After we installed them I did a dope slap and wished that I had put in continous shelf with stiles.

Sorry I don't have a photo of open cabinet.

The two cabs on left both open left; the two on right both open right. I do like that part. We did that because otherwise there isn't a lot of room to stand to the side of the range if the door is open. I think you could do that even if there were stiles. The narrow spacer on far right has usable space behind it--we can slip an extra item or two into that side space and still see it when standing there, but I have to reach on tiptoes.

Not sure if I would do this almost completely symmetrical config again. Might do one wider and one narrower each side of hood.

BTW,the distance between the two side countertops is 6.5 feet and I wouldn't want the width to be any wider.

In our old kitchen we had a very wide cabinet with only two doors opening from middle. I always wished that we had put in 3 doors with a second stile--would have not required that step backwards when opening those wide doors. If we didn't step back, the door hit us in the nose. The sharp corner edge was just at kid height at a difficult time in my girls' childhood.

Hello everyone!
Thank you so much for your answers! You have convinced me to spend the extra money. Besides not liking the 'wasted space,' I don't want to step back each time I open the doors (those doors would be almost 19" wide which would swing out ~7 inches past the lower cabinets -- and was a point I had not realized.)

My KD showed me that if I choose to go with 30" wide cabinets (biparting = no stile) and then vary the depth of the 12" cabinet to 16" on either side of the hood - I think it will still work well for us and not be annoying with that step back or 'unused space' behind. (Also the extra money is a little less than 10% the total cost of the cabinets, so I think I'll reap the enjoyment pretty quickly.)

If you happen to have any additional thoughts - They are much appreciated!
Tx!