Hi everyone,

Would like to pick your brain on this cabinet design. I'm building a set of kitchen cabinets and I am considering, for the base cabinets, having the look of the cabinets appear to be one door from afar, but be divided up with drawers.

With this, the top drawer would have stiles and a top rail without a bottom rail. Center drawer with only stiles, and bottom drawer, 2 stiles and bottom rail. When all the doors are closed, it'll look like one door that mirrors the upper cabinets.

I've never built cabinet doors this way and I'm thinking about drawbacks with gluing, shrinking and expansion, Etc. I am building these doors out of quarter-sawn white oak. The rails and stiles, 7/8 possibly with an inside bead, half inch solid inset panels. The grain of the panels will all be vertical to match the upper cabinet doors.

Has anyone ever done this before? Not sure how to approach the upper and lower sections because of the rails and protect it from shrinking and expansion through the seasons.

The middle section drawers that only have the stiles figured I would glue to the sides of the panel because the grain direction would all be matching.

Let me know what you think.

Thanks,

Tommy

PS after typing all this I just realized that the 33 in wide base cabinet may look goofy this way. But I could divide it up into two doors.

We have done this design a few times with mixed results.

The simplest method is to build a cabinet door and then cut it up into drawer fronts. Because the center panel is typically floating, the center panel has to be permanently attached to the stiles and rails in this case. This method works on smaller width drawer banks but can fail on wider drawers and on doors, which predictably tend to warp. Our success rate is probably 50%. Therefore we have abandoned this method.

The last project we did we applied faux stiles and rails to the surface of a 3/4" plywood panel. This worked because the entire elevation was drawer fronts that were attached to drawer boxes, so any fear of warping was eliminated.

I've decided the next time we do this design we will balance the panels by applying faux stiles and rails to both sides of a 1/2" plywood panel. We will edgeband after assembly. This will result in a 1-1/8" thick panel using 5/16" stile and rail thicknesses, which is the maximum thickness that we have found to function well with european style thick door hinges.

I've attached an image of a bathroom we built using the 1st method. We managed to get away with it in this room, but weren't so lucky in another area and had to replace all the fronts using method number 2.

View higher quality, full size image (756 X 1008)

Thanks a lot for your response. Your Cabinetry looks awesome. I had a feeling stability was going to be a huge issue with this design. Thanks for confirming it and sharing your work around. Totally explains why you don't see anyone else doing it that often!

I should also point out that method number 2 is a good way to achieve the skinny stile & rail design that a lot of designers are doing now.

I agree with DJS on his strategies. Stable panel is the key- stay away from solid wood for the panel. Make your own 5 ply or similar panels, add a false door frame and edge bands, and you are good to go.

Balanced construction keeps it all flat, and even the insides look good. I would make my panels 3/4"if I could.

For the book, I recently revisited some passage doors I made as pairs from 20 years ago. Each half of a pair was a 90 degree arch, with a round upper panel. Arch did not want the center rail to disturb the nice circle, so we used MDF veneered 2 sides. They were perfect. They were balanced.