Stylish kitchens on a budget
Can’t afford custom? Another option starts with Ikea cabinets
People often assume that getting a gorgeous kitchen like the ones they see in design magazines would require draining their bank account. And often, they’re right: Building a custom kitchen with upscale materials and finishes can easily run into six figures.
What they might not realize is that there are cost-saving alternatives that can deliver a high-end look for a fraction of the price. One of the most popular is building a kitchen with Ikea cabinets and then covering those cabinets with custom doors, drawer fronts and panels from companies like Reform, Semihandmade and Kokeena.
“Ikea makes a great box,” said John McDonald, the founder and chief executive of Semihandmade, a company based in Monrovia, California. And inside its Sektion cabinets, he added, Ikea “uses the best hardware you can get.”
Those hinges, drawer slides and other pieces, he said, are from Blum — the same brand of hardware that many custom cabinetmakers use, although Ikea’s products are far more reasonably priced.
Nathan Cuttle, an interior designer who founded New York-based Studio Nato, has built numerous kitchens with Ikea cabinets and custom doors from Reform and Semihandmade. “We’ve done some tight-budget projects,” he said, “but still wanted them to be unique.”
For the kitchen of an average one-bedroom apartment, “we’re not going to spend $40,000 on the kitchen cabinets, because we don’t have the budget,” he continued. “We’re going to spend maybe $1,500 to $2,000 on cabinets from Ikea and then have, say, $5,000 of custom fronts and panels.”
We asked designers and manufacturers to walk us through the process.
Find your inspiration
The first step in creating a kitchen you love is figuring out exactly what you want by searching for inspiration in design books, magazines and online sources like Pinterest, Instagram and Houzz.
Do you prefer upper cabinets or open shelves? Do you want an island? Do you like doors or drawers for the lower cabinets? Do you want custom panels to cover the dishwasher and refrigerator, to give them a built-in look?
Also consider the design and color you want for the finishing doors, drawer fronts and panels by browsing the offerings of custom door manufacturers, either online or in their showrooms. Semihandmade offers a range of choices, from paint-ready blank panels to designs from
Instagram influencers like Sarah Sherman Samuel. Reform, a company from Copenhagen, sells designs by European architects and designers like Bjarke Ingels Group and Norm Architects. Numerous other companies, including Kokeena, the Cabinet Face, Dunsmuir Cabinets and Scherr’s, offer many other choices.
Create a preliminary layout
Measure your kitchen floor and walls. Then begin designing the layout of your kitchen with Ikea’s online kitchen planner.
“You can put the dimensions of your kitchen into it and play with all the different configurations,” said Whitney Menefee, a founder of Townsend Interiors, in Portland, Oregon. “Even if you have no design experience at all, you can use that software to design your kitchen,” she said, by selecting and placing cabinet boxes on a floor plan. It automatically generates a shopping list of parts.
Menefee has designed many custom kitchens for clients but turned to Ikea’s kitchen planner when she sought a more affordable option for her own home. She later worked with Portlandbased Kokeena to develop custom doors, which evolved into Townsend Home, a new collection of cabinet doors that Kokeena now offers to all customers.
Contact the door manufacturer
Once you have a preliminary design and a style of door selected, share your plans with the custom door manufacturer.
“We recommend the client give us an Ikea drawing with the Ikea fronts and side panels on because then we know