This Kitchen Trend Is a Terrible Idea For Most People

Interior design trends don’t always play nicely with home organizing needs, and kitchens are a place where I have really been noticing this conflict. In particular, interior designers have been playing very fast and loose with one of the key storage elements in kitchen: upper cabinets!

Whether it’s glass front cabinets, open shelving, or even removing upper cabinets altogether, designers have targeted traditional upper cabinets as a dated design element. I get the impulse: a kitchen is a kitchen is a kitchen, and there’s only so much you can do to switch it up. And these upper cabinet alternatives can be so beautiful in a well designed space! But in a room where storage and organization is so paramount, there are serious consequences of taking this primary storage solution partially or totally off the table.

If you’re doing a kitchen remodel or in the process of looking for your next home, do yourself a favor and consider the upper cabinet situation before you sign on the dotted line. Here are some key pros and cons to keep in mind for these new twists on upper kitchen cabinets.

Glass Front Cabinets

Go open your upper kitchen cabinets. Right now! Don’t move anything! Would you be happy if, every day, you saw these cabinets through clear glass? If yes, glass front cabinets may be a good choice for you. But if not, beware. Keeping glass front cabinets looking tidy takes more work on a regular basis since you can’t just shove things in, close the doors, and forget about it. This is where self knowledge really comes into play: are you willing to do extra work to achieve the aesthetic?

Open Shelving

Open shelving adds another wrinkle to the issues brought up by glass front cabinets, and that issue is, quite simply, grossness. Kitchens are gross. If you’ve ever noticed a gloppy sheen on the bottles or utensils that you store right next to your stove you’ll know what I’m talking about. Anything that is stored out in the open in your kitchen will develop a film from cooking grease and dust, no matter how careful you are about how you cook. If you have open shelving, you need to add cleaning and/or dusting the items on those shelves and the shelves themselves to your weekly cleaning routine. Again: are you willing to do extra work to achieve the aesthetic?

No Upper Cabinets

The newest version of the upper cabinet craziness is just removing them altogether! And accompanying this trend is the tendency to install deep drawers as the only lower cabinet storage type. You can’t beat the look: it’s so clean and open. But before you do this, make sure you measure how much storage space you need and compare that to the total amount of storage in this upper-cabinet-free layout. When you remove upper cabinets, you remove as much as 40% of the storage space from a kitchen. And don’t forget to consider the types of items you store in upper cabinets and how you would store those things in drawers. I personally find storing bottles and glassware in deep drawers to be a dicey proposition!

A few years back, we had our kitchen cabinets repainted, so the doors were off for a few weeks, and I have to admit that having everything open drove me crazy.  My cabinets are pretty organized, but the feeling of STUFF hanging down from the walls got overwhelming, and then of course there’s always that one shelf where you shove all the bottles and cans you rarely use.   I prefer the clean look of closed cabinets – but aI tend toward a pretty traditional esthetic at my house!

What do you think of the new upper cabinet trends? Do you think one of them is right for you - or do you agree that all of them are a terrible idea for most people?

LMW