10 Tips To Make Kitchen Cabinet Storage Look Built-In For A Custom Luxury Design

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Have you ever spotted a carefully designed kitchen in a magazine and wondered why it looked so different from yours? It could be the styling materials or the lighting setups they use that make the rooms look so cool and luxurious. Or, it could be the kitchen cabinets. When your cabinets look bland, uninteresting, or ready-made, they can feel noticeably run-of-the-mill and far less luxurious. So, if you're searching for a way to get that custom, luxurious feel in your own kitchen, you may want to look into some methods of personalizing your cabinets so that they feel suited to your space and your own individual design preferences. 

This is not only great for updating outdated kitchen cabinets and making them feel more like an extension of your own personality, but these tricks are also helpful for making your kitchen more practical. From hiding joins with trim to adding detailed panels to cabinet doors for increased depth, there are plenty of useful ways to instantly upgrade the feel of your kitchen cabinets and make them appear more custom. These hacks require a range of different skill levels and tools, so even if you're a beginner to DIY, chances are at least a few of these will still be doable for you. Let's dive into some of the ways you can make your kitchen feel designer by adding custom elements to your existing cabinets.

Almost nothing in a kitchen makes it look more haphazard than having unsightly gaps between the cabinets and their surroundings. So, if you are keen to give your space a more luxurious and intentional feel, why not create some fillers? Start by using nails or wood glue to attach two pieces of wood into a corner shape. Then, paint the front-facing piece to match the cabinets and slide the filler into the visible gaps. This will give the illusion that your cabinets extend to the walls, making them look like they were designed especially for your space.

The doors of your cabinet are the most visible, so if they look flat and plain, that can be a dead giveaway that your cabinetry isn't custom. By adding some detailed panels to the face of each cabinet, you can give them depth and dimension while creating a more unique look overall. Simply select some panels that will fit on the front of your cabinet doors — like these Ekena Millwork raised wall panels – and attach them using a nail gun. Then, paint over both the panel and cabinet door to create a cohesive, built-in look.

If you like the idea of adding dimension to your cabinets but want something a little different, you could try out a DIY fluted upgrade. Pole-wrap is a sheet of fluted wood used to give poles a column-esque look. However, this material can be utilized to give cabinet doors a custom style. Just cut the pole wrap to the size you want, paint it to match the cabinets, then attach using some wood glue. You may need to do some touch-ups with the paint once the pole wrap is installed to fix any chips that have occurred.

One tip for making your kitchen feel personalized and visually interesting is to mix closed cabinets with open shelving. This is a great way to break up the space and stop your kitchen from feeling too cramped and homogenous. In addition, the open shelving can be used to display decorative items so your cabinets feel like they were designed around your possessions rather than the other way around. Simply unscrew the hinges and remove the doors of a few cabinets. Then, fill in the holes and paint over them so the open shelving looks perfectly built-in.

If you have separate cabinet units stacked on top of one another, you can end up with annoying joins between them. To fix this issue and make the separate units look built-in, try adding trim over the seams. This will help your cabinets look like one solid piece rather than a mishmash of different units. Chair rail trim works well for this tip because it was originally designed to help protect walls from damage caused by furniture. This means that it has some natural depth, adding interesting visual appeal where there was previously an unsightly join.

One common suggestion for making cabinets look built-in is adding a baseboard. However, toe kicks tend to be more practical in the kitchen because baseboards don't allow enough room for standing in high-traffic areas, such as by the sink and fridge. A better option for making kitchen cabinets look custom, then, may be to add feet. This can be done in a few ways – from purchasing ready-made feet to cutting them yourself. This is a great way to break up long, boring lines in your kitchen and make your cabinets look like solid built-ins rather than flimsy add-ons.

Built-in cabinets often extend from wall-to-wall or ceiling-to-floor. To emulate this look with your existing cabinets, you can try adding crown molding to the top. If your cabinets nearly reach to the ceiling already, then adding crown molding can help create a bridge between the units and the ceiling. But if your cabinets are nowhere near the top of the room, don't worry. Installing a layer of crown molding — even if it doesn't reach all the way to the ceiling — is still a great way to make your cabinets look more ornate and intentional.

If you have sections of cabinetry with large spaces in between, such as around the oven or in a desk nook, your kitchen can feel a little disjointed. One great way to make the different areas feel like one big built-in unit is to unify them using paneling. For example, beadboard paneling is the classy wall option that, when painted in a similar color to your cabinets, connects your cabinetry together and adds visual dimension at the same time. Painting the paneling with a semi-gloss paint is also good for protecting it from kitchen spills.

Just like large gaps between the cabinet and the wall, smaller gaps can also make your kitchen look unfinished and haphazard. Caulking is a great way to fill in those little spaces, such as around the outside of the cabinets and around shelves. By covering up all those small joins between the cabinets, shelves, and drawers, you can effectively clean up the look of your space and make it feel seamless, as if it was built in together. Make sure to cut the tip of your caulk as small as possible and at an angle so that you get a precise fill in each of these small joins.

Making your kitchen look custom is hard when your appliances stick out like sore thumbs. By covering larger appliances like fridges and dishwashers with panels that match your cabinets, you can make them look like one cohesive unit. Simply remove the handles from your appliance, add hinges to the door panels, then use sliders like these UPTTHOW integrated door sliders to attach the panel to the appliance and allow it to slide open when in use. If your appliance is on the end, you can add a matching panel to the side so that it blends in.