Handles are the hardware you choose. Hinges and runners are the hardware that decides whether the kitchen still feels new in ten years — and they are specified by somebody else, in millimetres, before you ever touch the door.
Open every door and drawer in a ten-year-old kitchen, one after another, and you can grade the whole job in about ninety seconds. Not from the doors — a tired front and a good one look much the same from four feet away. From the last inch of travel. Which doors draw themselves shut and which stop a finger’s width short. Which drawers come back level and which one sits proud on the left, so its front no longer lines up with the one below it. None of that is the kitchen you chose. It is the hardware that came in the box, doing what it was always going to do.
There are two hardware conversations in a kitchen and they have almost nothing to do with each other.
The first is handles: knobs, bar pulls, cup pulls, the finish, the centres, where the holes go. That one is a design decision you make late, with samples on the counter, and every hole you drill for it is permanent. It has its own page — the handles guide covers hole spacing, placement and what wears through, and nothing on this page repeats it.
The second is the hardware that moves: the concealed hinges behind every door and the runners under every drawer. You do not shop for these the way you shop for a pull. They are specified in millimetres by whoever engineered the cabinet, they arrive fitted or in a bag, and then you operate them for a decade without looking at them once.
The drawer beside the hob gets opened eight to fifteen times a day in a household that cooks; call it ten, and over ten years that is thirty-six thousand cycles, each carrying a stack of pans and most ending in a shove from a hip. Which is why moving hardware is sold with a cycle rating at all — 50,000 to 100,000 cycles is the normal published band for runners and hinges alike, and it is a number nobody quotes about a handle.
What they search at midnight “undermount vs side mount drawer slides” — usually the night before an order closes, holding a spec sheet that says “soft-close undermount runners” and wondering whether that is a promise or just a word.
On our own cabinets none of this is a menu. Every box ships with concealed soft-close hinges and their mounting plates, and drawers on a steel drawer-side system — the metal side wall and the undermount runner are one engineered part, with 16 mm panels forming the floor and the back. You do not pick a hinge angle, a plate height or a runner brand from a list, because they come with the cabinet. What the boxes are made of is here.
So why the geometry still matters: once the hardware is settled, every remaining hardware problem is a layout problem. A door that cannot open far enough, a pull-out that fouls a door, a drawer that hits a handle on the return run — those are solved on the plan with a filler or three inches of shuffle, not by ordering a different hinge.
Nearly every door in a modern kitchen hangs from the same invention: a 35 mm round cup bored into the back of the door, an arm that folds out of it, and a plate screwed to the cabinet side. That cup is why a hinge from one maker lands on another maker’s holes, and why a soft-close hinge can replace a plain one twenty years later. Of the three numbers that describe a hinge, only that 35 is fixed. The other two were settled by whoever bored the door and chose the plate, and between them they decide where the door ends up.
One: cup diameter. 35 mm, bored 12 to 13 mm deep. That depth is why door thickness matters: a 13 mm cup in an 18 mm door leaves 5 mm of material in front of the bore, which is enough and no more. It is also why nobody bores a 35 mm cup into a 12 mm panel — small 26 mm hinges exist for thin and narrow doors precisely because the big cup will not fit.
Two: bore distance — the gap from the edge of the door to the near edge of the cup. The normal range is 3 to 7 mm and the usual setting is 5 mm, which puts the centre of the cup 22.5 mm in from the door edge (17.5 mm of cup radius plus the 5). Shift that bore by a millimetre and two things shift with it, by about the same millimetre: how far the door hangs over the cabinet side, and how much clearance it needs to swing past its neighbour. They move together, which is why a maker publishes a chart of bore distance against overlay for each of its hinges rather than a rule you can carry from one to the next.
Three: plate height — 0, 3, 6 or 9 mm on a frameless cabinet (an 18 mm plate exists too, for inset). The plate is a spacer between the cabinet side and the hinge arm, and each 3 mm step pushes the door 3 mm further toward the middle of the opening. The plate is where the overlay is actually set. Get it wrong and no amount of turning the adjustment screws brings the door back: you are three millimetres out in a range that offers two.
Now the arithmetic that connects those millimetres to the doors you can see. On a pair of doors sharing one opening, each door’s overlay is (combined door width − opening) ÷ 2, before you allow for the gap where the two doors meet in the middle.
Work it on a 36″ base cabinet. With ¾″ sides the opening — the clear space between the side panels — is 34½″. The doors are cut to cover the box with a hairline at each outer edge and a gap in the middle — a sixteenth outside and an eighth between is the usual convention, and it makes each door 17⅞″. (Every factory has its own reveal schedule, so take the principle and not the fraction.) Run the formula: (35¾″ of door − 34½″ of opening) ÷ 2 = ⅝″. Add half the centre gap — a sixteenth — and each door actually sits on 11/16″ of the panel, about 17 mm of an 18 mm edge: full overlay in practice, covering everything but the hairline you left on purpose.
Turn the formula around and it sizes doors instead of checking them: door width = (opening + twice the overlay − the centre gap) ÷ 2. Either direction, the useful habit is to measure the opening, not the cabinet. A 36″ cabinet with thicker sides has a smaller opening and needs narrower doors, and nothing about the label tells you that.
One more number explains why so much of this interchanges: the 32 mm system. Plate screws sit 32 mm apart, in 5 mm holes, 37 mm back from the panel’s front edge — the same grid the shelf-pin holes march down. It is why a replacement hinge bought in a hurry lands on holes that are already there.
Overlay is simply how much of the cabinet the door covers, and it is the one hinge decision that changes what the kitchen looks like from across the room. Three arrangements exist, and the reveal — the shadow line between one door and the next — announces which one you have.
| Arrangement | What the door does | What you see between doors | Where it belongs | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Full overlay | Covers the side panel almost completely, about 17 mm of an 18 mm panel | 1/16″ to ⅛″ | Frameless kitchens, almost without exception | The hairline reveal shows every out-of-parallel door in the run at a glance |
| Half overlay | Two doors share one panel, roughly half each | ⅛″ or so | Two doors hanging off one shared partition, and most face-frame work | Needs a half-crank hinge or a taller plate; get it wrong and the two doors collide |
| Inset | Sits inside the opening, its face flush with the front edge | 3/32″ to ⅛″ all round | Traditional face-frame cabinetry, built by somebody who does it often | Forgives nothing: every twist in the box and every seasonal move in the door is on display |
Why frameless kitchens are almost always full overlay. A face-framed cabinet has a wooden frame across its front, which gives an inset door something to shut against and something to look deliberate against. A frameless box has no frame: its front is the 18 mm edge of the side panel, finished with a band of matching PVC. Set a door inside that opening and you have made the band the feature, surrendered opening width on every cabinet, and asked a factory-built box to hold a tolerance only a bench joiner hits twice in a row. Cover the panel instead and the face of the kitchen becomes doors, uninterrupted, with a shadow line between them — which is what frameless is for.
It also changes what fits inside. Inset belongs to face-frame construction, and the frame itself eats the opening: a 1½″ stile overhanging a ¾″ side panel costs you ¾″ of clear width on each side. On a 15″ cabinet that is an inch and a half of drawer gone, which is a pan lying flat or not.
Our cabinets are frameless and full overlay, and the doors you pick cover the whole box. There is no inset option, which is an honest limitation and also a deliberate one: inset is a way of building a box, not a setting you turn on at the hinge — the plate can put a door inside the opening, but holding a 3/32″ reveal all round for twenty years is a property of the carcass. The vocabulary for all of this is in the glossary if a spec sheet starts throwing words at you.
The reveal also earns its keep as a free, continuous measuring instrument. An even hairline top to bottom and end to end means a run hung properly on a level carcass; a reveal that opens from 1/16″ at the top to ⅛″ at the bottom is a door out of adjustment or a cabinet out of plumb — visible from the doorway, long before a tape would find it.
A hinge’s opening angle is how far the door will swing before the hinge itself stops it. 110° is the industry default and it is enough for the ordinary case: a door in front of shelves. The door goes past square, clears the opening, and stays out of your way while you reach in.
It is not enough for the case that matters more. Put a drawer, a basket or a pull-out behind that door and the door has to leave the opening completely, because the pull-out travels straight through the plane the door is standing in. At 110° the door leans back only 20° past square, and its hinge-side edge plus the arm still occupy the first inch of the opening on that side — precisely the inch a pull-out’s runner needs. So a door with anything sliding behind it wants 155° or 170°, which folds it back nearly flat against the neighbouring cabinet and empties the opening.
Wide-angle hinges are not free. The arm is bigger and jointed, it wants a slightly larger bore distance, and the door sweeps a wider arc on its way round — so the cabinet next to it has to give up the space the door passes through. A wide-angle door that fouls its neighbour on the way open is common, and it is avoided on the plan rather than at the hinge.
Restriction cuts the other way. A clip dropped into a 110° hinge takes it to 86°; other hinges are born narrow — 95° and 100° models exist as their own products. Either way the point is to protect something: a door that would otherwise slam its corner into the handle of the cabinet on the return run, a wall the door would mark, a window reveal. What restriction costs you is the opening. A door held to 90° stands exactly in the path of anything you try to withdraw, so a restricted door with a pull-out behind it is a design that has quietly cancelled itself.
The corner is where all of this arrives at once. Add it up: ¾″ of door leaf plus a pull that projects another 1¼ to 1½″ means the open leaf and its handle occupy roughly two and a quarter inches of the corner — and the perpendicular run’s door face is standing right there. That is why a filler strip at an inside corner is not a tidying detail but a functional part: it is the space that lets both doors and both handles exist. Three inches is the usual answer, two inches survives on the drawing and fails the day somebody specifies bar pulls, and it needs to be on the plan before anything is ordered.
One place we do specify a different hinge makes the point nicely. An aluminium-framed glass door has a stile only about ¾″ wide, so there is no broad door back to bore a standard cup into: it takes a narrow-arm 95° hinge, because that is what physically fits. The angle was not chosen for how the door should behave — it was decided by how wide the material is.
Two ways the hinge arm meets the plate. Screw-on (fixed-arm) hinges bolt to it with a machine screw — perfectly good, and the drawback appears only on the day you need the door off: putting it back means finding the adjustment again by eye.
Clip-on hinges snap onto the plate and release with a lever. The door comes off in about a second and goes back in exactly the position it left, adjustment untouched. That sounds like a convenience until you count the times it matters: hanging heavy doors alone (plates first, doors clipped on after), drilling handles on a bench rather than over your head, taking eight doors off to paint a wall, getting a fridge past a run of cabinets.
Then the part everyone eventually needs: concealed hinges adjust three ways, and each direction has its own screw.
Learn which symptom belongs to which screw and you will stop turning things at random. Two doors whose top corners do not line up: side to side. A door standing proud at the handle edge, or one whose soft close never grabs: depth. A door sitting low against the one beneath it: height, on the plate. The method — one door at a time, a quarter-turn at a time, with a screwdriver and not a drill — belongs to the finishing chapter.
The limit is worth stating plainly, because people burn an afternoon against it. Adjustment moves a door about two millimetres each way. That is fine tuning, not repair. If a door is a quarter-inch out and the screws are at the end of their travel, the problem is upstream — a cabinet out of square, a run out of level, the wrong plate, or a screw that has let go of the board. Diagnosing which is its own page.
Soft close is a small hydraulic damper that catches the last stretch of travel — the final inch at the hinge, two or three at the far edge of a wide door — and sets the door down on its stop instead of letting it slam. It is the most-felt upgrade in a kitchen and one of the least understood, because the same phrase covers three different mechanisms.
| Where the damper is | How it behaves | Retrofit? | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Integrated in the hinge cup | Invisible, consistent, nothing to knock; most have a switch that turns the damper off on one hinge of the pair, for a door too small or too light to push through it | Yes, by swapping the whole hinge | When it eventually tires, you replace a hinge rather than a part |
| Clip-on damper on the arm | A small cylinder that pushes onto an existing hinge arm in seconds | Yes — this is the true retrofit | Visible when the door is open, can be knocked off, and can stop a narrow light door from latching |
| Damper mounted in the cabinet | A plunger screwed to the box that the closing door presses | Yes, with any hinge at all, including screw-on | Has to be positioned by trial; it pushes back, so a door with a weak catch can bounce open |
Doors retrofit easily, and the reason is the 35 mm cup. Because the cup and the 32 mm plate grid are industry standards, a soft-close hinge with the same crank and plate height drops into the holes already bored and the door hangs where it hung — you are not modifying anything, you are exchanging a part in a system designed to be exchanged. If the existing hinges are sound, a clip-on damper on each arm does most of the same work with no tools at all.
Drawers do not retrofit, and this is where the phrase misleads. An adhesive bumper stuck to the cabinet quietens a drawer; it is not soft close and it will not pull anything shut. Real soft close on a drawer lives inside the runner, which means replacing the runner pair with a soft-close set of exactly the same length and type — and if the existing runners are the old epoxy roller sort, the new ones very often need a drawer box of a different width, so you are rebuilding the box too. On a steel drawer-side system the damper is already part of the runner: there is nothing to add, and nowhere to add it.
One honest note, because it saves a service call: the commonest “my soft close has failed” is not a failed damper at all. It is a door sitting a couple of millimetres too far off the box for the mechanism to engage — the depth screw from the previous section.
There is a two-second test for sorting any drawer in a kitchen, and it needs no tools. Pull it out and look at the sides. Steel showing beside the drawer box means side-mount, which comes in two grades and is where this section starts. Nothing showing but wood or a painted panel, and the drawer coming all the way out, means undermount. A thin steel wall that is the side of the drawer means a steel drawer-side system, which is the next section.
Before the families, the rule that governs the first two: a side-mount runner eats half an inch on each side, so the drawer box must be exactly one inch narrower than the opening. Exactly — not roughly. An eighth of an inch too narrow and the drawer rattles and runs crooked; an eighth too wide and it binds, or will not go in. This is the single most common measuring error in amateur drawer-making, and it is also why the drawer box you already own rarely fits a different family of runner.
Epoxy roller, side-mount, three-quarter extension. A formed steel channel with nylon rollers, powder-coated white or brown, self-closing because the back of the track ramps upward and gravity finishes the job. It is the runner in most rental kitchens and most flat-pack furniture, it retrofits into almost anything, and it is the least expensive way to make a drawer move. Three-quarter extension is the real cost: on a 21″ drawer about five inches stay inside the cabinet permanently, which is where forgotten things live. It fails two recognisable ways — a roller flat-spots, so the drawer clunks at the same place every time, and the light channel splays under load, so the drawer noses down as it comes out.
Ball-bearing, side-mount, full extension. Two or three telescoping steel members with a ball carriage between them. The drawer comes fully clear of the cabinet, the action is smooth, and a standard pair is typically rated around 75 to 100 lb with heavy-duty pairs above that. It is still a side-mount, so it takes the same half-inch per side and you look at steel whenever the drawer is open. Failures: grit in the race, felt as a rough spot rather than heard; a carriage bent by a genuinely overloaded drawer, which shows up as a drawer that will not travel the last inch; and the release lever snapped off by somebody removing a drawer in a hurry.
Undermount, full extension. Two runners beneath the box, invisible from every angle, normally with soft close built into the runner itself, and the adjustment in a locking device at the front of each one. This is the current standard in a well-made kitchen, and it is paid for in tolerance: the box is built to the runner, not the other way round. Typically the box is 42 mm narrower than the opening — call it 1⅝″ if you are working in inches, but cut it off the metric number, because this is the dimension that has to be right. The bottom sits in a groove at a set height so the locking devices can reach it, the back gets notches in known positions, and the depth matches the runner length exactly. Out by a millimetre or two and the drawer will not latch or will not sit level. Right, and it is the best drawer action there is.
| Family | Width it takes | Travel | What it demands of the box | How it fails |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Epoxy roller (side-mount) | ½″ per side | About ¾ | Box exactly 1″ narrower than the opening; a simple four-sided box will do | Flat-spotted roller, splayed channel, drawer noses down when loaded |
| Ball-bearing (side-mount) | ½″ per side | Full | Same 1″ rule, and a box square enough that the two runners stay parallel | Grit in the race, a carriage bent by overload, a snapped release lever |
| Undermount | About 1⅝″ total | Full | Set box width, a bottom groove at a set height, notches in the back, exact depth | Will not latch or will not sit level if the box is out; damper jams if slammed |
Two cautions about the numbers on the box. A load rating is a static figure for a pair at full extension under laboratory conditions, and a kitchen drawer of plates is nowhere near it — the rating is worth reading as a proxy for how the drawer will feel when it is heavy, not as the point at which it breaks. And runner length is not drawer depth: a 21″ runner needs a box 21″ deep, in a cabinet 24″ deep, which is exactly why the last two or three inches at the back of a base cabinet do not belong to you.
The fourth arrangement is not a slide you buy and a box you build. It is one part doing both jobs: a steel side wall with the undermount runner engineered into it. The drawer then consists of two steel sides, a back, a bottom panel and a bracket that carries the front. That is the entire parts list.
To see why it matters, consider how a conventional drawer fails. A four-sided wooden box carries its load through four corner joints, and every opening racks them a little — you pull on one handle in the middle and the box tries to become a parallelogram. The front corners loosen first, because the front takes the pull. That is not cosmetic: the box goes out of square, the two runners are no longer parallel, and the drawer starts to rub. Almost every old drawer that binds is an old drawer joint that has let go.
A steel drawer side deletes that failure mode by deleting the joints. There is no wooden side to screw a runner to, so there is nothing for a screw to pull out of; the load path is steel from the front bracket to the cabinet. The front hangs on a bracket with its own adjustment, so a front that has drifted out of line is corrected with a screwdriver rather than re-drilled. And because the side wall is thin steel doing the work that a ⅝″ board plus a runner used to do between them, less of the cabinet’s width disappears into the mechanism.
This is what our drawers are: the metal side wall and the undermount slide are one engineered part, and 16 mm melamine-faced panels with matching banding drop into it to form the floor and the back — so the inside of the drawer is a sealed, wipeable surface rather than raw board. The full construction, panel by panel, is in the materials chapter.
The honest catch is that you have bought into a system. The sides are system parts in system heights, so a damaged one is replaced from the same system rather than knocked up in a workshop, and you raise the effective height of the drawer with a railing or an insert designed for it rather than by making the side taller. For a kitchen that is a fair trade. For somebody who likes to rebuild things from scrap timber, it genuinely is not.
Hardware complaints arrive in a reliable order, and not one of the four is the hinge or the runner wearing out. Every one of them is a fixing, a setting, or a cabinet that is not square.
Every showroom looks the same for the first thirty seconds. Here is how to make a display cabinet tell you what it is built from, in under a minute, without asking a question anybody can answer from a brochure.
Push the door closed with one finger, at the top corner furthest from the hinge. Worst-case leverage, and the honest test. A properly specified soft close takes the door from two or three inches out and lands it without a bounce and without a second push. If you have to help it home, the damper is undersized or the door sits too far off the box — either way, that is a door you will be nudging shut twice a day forever.
Then open the same door fully and press down gently on its outer bottom corner. There should be almost no give. Real flex means a thin door, a shallow cup, or plate screws that are already moving in the board. While the door is open, look at the arm and the plate: the numbers stamped on them are the hinge’s identity, and a photograph of them is worth more than any conversation about quality.
Pull the drawer fully out and stop looking at the front. Does the box come completely clear of the cabinet, so you can reach the back corners without fishing? Look at how it is joined — dovetailed, dowelled, screwed, or a steel side with the bottom captured in it — and count the fasteners you can see. Then put a little weight on the front edge of the open drawer. It should not tip, and the back should not lift.
Our free planner draws every cabinet at its real catalogue size with its real face — which doors and which drawer fronts a given cabinet actually has — and the elevation view shows that face straight on, so you can see the reveal pattern of a whole run and where a filler is or is not sitting in a corner. That is the layout half of this page, and it is the half you can settle before anything is ordered.
What it does not do, and will not pretend to: nothing in it checks a clearance. It will not warn you that two doors will meet in a corner, or that a pull-out will foul the door in front of it. It will show you — in Edit 3D, press O and every door and drawer in the room opens on its own hinge line, which is the fastest way to see two corner doors arrive in the same cubic inch — but reading that picture is your job, not the software’s. There is a Measure tool and an editable GAP number, and both are things you use deliberately. Walk the corners yourself with the numbers from this page. If a term on the drawing is unfamiliar, the glossary is one click away.
And the honest limit on the whole subject. Everything above is readable from a spec sheet, a tape measure and an open cabinet door, and it will tell you whether a kitchen was engineered or assembled. What it cannot tell you is how a particular factory’s boring machine was set on the morning your doors went through it. That is what the first week of living with a kitchen is for — walk the run, look along the reveals, and give the three or four doors that drifted their quarter-turn. It is an afternoon’s work, set out in the finishing chapter, and it is done once.
Undermount, if the drawer box is built for it. Undermount runners sit beneath the box, so nothing metal is visible, the drawer comes fully out, and the soft close is built into the runner. Side-mount runners are visible whenever the drawer is open and the cheaper epoxy roller type only pulls out about three quarters of the way. The catch is tolerance: an undermount box has to be built to the runner, with a set width, a bottom groove at a set height and notches in the back, so it is much harder to retrofit into an existing drawer.
A side-mount runner takes half an inch on each side, so the drawer box must be exactly 1 inch narrower than the cabinet opening. An eighth of an inch too narrow and it rattles and runs crooked; an eighth too wide and it binds. Undermount runners typically ask for 42 mm, a shade over 1 and 5 eighths inches, off the box width in total. A steel drawer side takes about the same half inch per side off the opening, but nothing wooden then sits inside that half inch, so the usable width inside the drawer is the widest of the three.
The cup is the round recess bored into the back of a door that the hinge body sits in. It is 35 mm across and 12 to 13 mm deep, and it is the standard that lets hinges from different makers land on the same holes. The bore distance is the gap from the edge of the door to the near edge of that cup, normally 3 to 7 mm and usually 5 mm, which puts the cup centre 22.5 mm in from the door edge. Shifting the bore by a millimetre shifts the door’s overlay and the clearance it needs to swing by about a millimetre too, which is why hinge makers publish a chart of bore distance against overlay for each hinge.
Full overlay means the door covers its cabinet side almost completely, leaving only a hairline reveal of a sixteenth to an eighth of an inch between doors. Half overlay means two doors share one panel between them, roughly half each. Inset means the door sits inside the opening with its face flush with the front edge and a reveal all the way round. Frameless kitchens are almost always full overlay, because there is no face frame for an inset door to shut against and inset would surrender opening width on every cabinet.
Take the combined width of the two doors, subtract the width of the opening between the cabinet sides, and halve the result. That gives each door’s overlay before you allow for the gap where the two doors meet in the middle. On a 36 inch box with three quarter inch sides the opening is 34 and a half inches, two doors at 17 and 7 eighths inches give 35 and 3 quarters inches of door, and the arithmetic lands on 5 eighths of an inch per side. Always measure the opening rather than trusting the cabinet’s nominal width.
110 degrees is the default and it is enough for a door in front of shelves. You need 155 or 170 degrees when something slides out from behind the door, because a pull-out or a wire basket travels straight through the plane the door is standing in, and at 110 degrees the door edge and the hinge arm still occupy the first inch of the opening. Wide-angle hinges sweep a bigger arc on the way round, so check that the door will not foul the cabinet beside it.
Two ways, both easy, because the 35 mm cup and the 32 mm plate screw spacing are industry standards. Clip a small damper onto the arm of each existing hinge, which takes seconds and no tools. Or swap the whole hinge for a soft-close version with the same crank and the same plate height, which drops into the holes already bored and leaves the door hanging exactly where it was. Drawers are the opposite story: an adhesive bumper only quietens them, and real soft close means replacing the runners.
The working convention is two hinges up to about 36 inches of door height and three from there to about 60 inches, with a fourth beyond that, and one extra for a glass door or any unusually heavy one, because hinge charts are published against weight as well as height. An 18 mm door of 15 by 42 inches weighs somewhere around ten to twelve pounds and every ounce of it hangs on the cups, so a tall door hung on two hinges is one of the standard reasons a door starts to sag.
Pull it fully out and see whether the box clears the cabinet, so you can reach the back corners without fishing. Look at how the box is joined and count the visible fasteners. Put a little weight on the front edge of the open drawer: it should not tip and the back should not lift. Then close five drawers quickly in a row and listen, because on a good run they all sound identical and the odd one out is the one with a problem.
Draw the run at real cabinet widths, look at it in elevation, and find the corner where two doors and two handles are about to meet — while a three-inch filler is still a drawing and not a delivery.
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