Everything About Frameless Kitchen Cabinets

European cupboards are called frameless style boxes. I’ve built thousands of kitchen cabinets using the frameless method of fabrication. There are a few things that will identify an authentic European kitchen. In this article, we will look at these unique qualities.

Door Margins
When cupboards are an authentic European style, they will only have eight inch (1/8″) margins between the doors. There will be no large gaps at all. Some companies even install fillers in the corners that are flush with the doors to eliminate the large scribe gaps that are usually one to three inches wide.

Hinges
They are referred to as European hinges, concealed or cup hinges. The only way to see them is when you open the door. They get mounted into a hole that is drilled on the back of the door. They have several different adjustments. The reason for this is to allow the eight inch margins on the frameless kitchen cabinets to be easily adjusted and maintained.

Fabricated as Small Modular Boxes
Some of the face-frame style cupboards are built in modular units these days. Years ago they were fabricated in large sections. Frameless cabinets are built as individual boxes. This makes it easy for one person to handle most of the parts that comprise a kitchen. There are small companies where one man does everything from start to finish, even the delivery and installation.

As an example:
If you had a sixty inch (60″) space, one cupboard would not be fabricated that large. Instead, the frameless cupboards would be made as two thirty inch (30″) boxes.

Because of how close the doors are to one another, the frameless style has been also called the flush door cabinet style.

Cabinet Construction
Most of the cabinets are fabricated out of five eights inch thick materials except for the doors; they are generally made out of three quarters inch thick wood. Many framless cabinet fabricators use the thirty two millimeter (32mm) system. This is a production setup that allows parts to be quickly assembled together.

Frameless cabinets became popular in the early nineteen seventies in America. They originated in Europe. Now there are cross breads of frameless kitchens and face-frame styles throughout America. Some custom cabinet makers have taken the best of both worlds and created their own unique style. I suppose you could call them hybrid kitchen cabinets.