How the cabinet door fits over the cabinet box determines its basic type.

Inset cabinet doors sit within the rails and stiles and lay flush with the front edges of the cabinet box. Truly inset doors are only available with a framed construction, but designers can achieve the same look using vertical pilasters on frameless cabinets.

Lipped doors are routed with a slight wooden groove to fit over the face frame. Partial overlay doors somewhat conceal the frame, while full overlay doors have less than one-eighth of an inch between them. Frameless cabinets have full overlay doors but some framed cabinets have them as well. You can tell for sure whether a cabinet is framed or frameless by opening a cabinet door and checking for rails and stiles.

Besides cabinet door type, you’ll want to consider different door shapes. One cabinet manufacturer may offer hundreds of door styles in an endless array of finishes.

Your options for cabinet door styles include:

Recessed panel	Raised panel	Curved panel
Beadboard panel	Flat slab

While the cabinet door’s type and shape may supply the backbeat, its color and decoration add rhythm and harmony. A flat slab, oak door stained with a light color, for example, will sing a much different tune than a flat slab, MDF door covered in stainless steel.

Like the finest furniture, the highest quality cabinets are finished in multiple steps, which might include hand sanding, rubbing with steel wool, and hand buffing. Compare it to painting: You want to apply several thin layers so that if it chips it won’t all peel off. The multiple steps also help create a smoother texture and a deeper color.

Your options for how to decorate the cabinet door include:

• Stain
• Wood veneer
• Paint
• Polyester
• Plastic laminate
• Stainless steel
• Glass

Stain

Manufacturers use all different names for stain colors. One company’s “amber” may not look anything like another’s with the same name. Think in terms of tone. Choose the wood you prefer and then decide whether a stain with a light, medium, or dark tone will best achieve the effect you’re after.

Your choice of wood will have the most impact on the cabinet’s ultimate look. If you want a light look, for example, you might start with a light wood like ash, beech, birch, elm, oak, maple, or chestnut. In the mid-range, consider cherry with a natural finish. Or you can stain maple to be darker than its natural color.

For a dark kitchen, you’d want to start with a wood that has a little color to it. But don’t start with a dark wood like walnut and try to lighten it. You can always darken the color of lighter woods, but it’s hard to go the other way.

You can also consider clear finishes rather than stains on cherry, walnut, and other woods rich in color, such as butternut, mahogany, rosewood, and teak.

A stain shouldn’t be confused with a finish. A finishing coat is applied over the stain to protect it. Typically, a stain will be coated with a catalytic-conversion varnish to give it durability and sheen—whether matte or high-gloss or anything in-between. When it’s baked on, the varnish catalyzes into a hard, protective finish. You don’t want to top the stain with oil, lacquer, or wax because those substances won’t hold up and will yellow over time. Glazes can be used as an overcoat to achieve certain effects, such as an antique look.

Wood veneer

Wood veneer is made from peeling strips of wood off a tree like you pull paper towels off a roll. As a result, it’s much thinner than solid wood and is typically applied to plywood or particleboard to give it strength. It has two main advantages over solid wood: It can cost less and its grain can be more consistent.

You can stain wood veneer to match a solid wood door and use it on the side panels. Make sure both the veneer and the door are made from the same wood species.

Wood veneer also makes an attractive option for cabinet interiors visible through glass doors.

Paint

With paint you certainly have an endless palette of colors to choose from. You can also achieve a range of special effects. Paint can look smooth and glossy or it can be sanded, rubbed off, or dented with rocks to look distressed. But you should be aware up front that hairline cracks will appear at the joints of solid wood doors as the wood expands and contracts. You can avoid cracking if you apply paint to MDF, a solid material that doesn’t move with humidity changes.

Polyester

It isn’t that big of a leap to cabinets from cars, on which this finish has been commonly applied. The same durability and quality needed on the road is also appreciated in the kitchen. There, polyester can be found on appliances as well as modern-style cabinets, in a glossy or matte finish. It fills the pores of the door more fully than paint, giving it a solid look and feel.

The technique might involve more than 20 steps of sanding and finishing. There’s even a step where a special topcoat is applied in a dust-free (!) room. The finish goes through numerous oven curings and hand sandings with extremely fine abrasives. Special glazes and polishes applied at the end help achieve the final, mirror-like sheen.

Perhaps not surprisingly, all that elbow grease makes this one of the more expensive finish choices.

Plastic laminate

Plastic laminate comes in all kinds of colors, patterns, and textures. It’s durable, stain-resistant, and easy to clean. But it can be hard to repair if it chips because it’s made of layers—sheets of kraft paper (like that used in grocery bags), a decorative paper, and a plastic coating. The layers are all pressed together under high heat.

The kraft paper leaves a brown edge that can be covered and dressed up with a stainless steel, brass, or wood trim. Solid-color laminate offers a slightly more expensive alternative that uses plastic sheets of the same color throughout so that no dark edges show.

Stainless steel

Stainless steel can be found on just about every design element in the kitchen these days. On cabinets, it’s typically formed around an inner core material to give it substance and keep it from sounding tinny. While you can get a very sleek look from stainless steel, it shows fingerprints and scratches.

Glass

Glass presents yet another option for the look of the cabinet door. Mixing glass in with other door fronts in the kitchen can add interest to any design, particularly to stock cabinets that might otherwise lack unique touches. Some glasses are ribbed or etched so that the colors—not the messy details—of the dishes or cereal boxes sitting behind them show through. The ribbing may be vertical, horizontal, or diagonal. Other glass doors may be clear or colored.