In-frame or frameless: which one do you actually want?

In-frame is exactly what it sounds like. The door sits inside a solid timber frame that is fixed to the front of the carcass, so that what you see is a border of frame around every door and drawer, the way you would on a piece of freestanding furniture. Frameless — sometimes called full overlay, or European — does away with that frame. The doors cover the whole front of the box and sit close together, almost touching, with nothing showing between them but a thin shadow line. Both are legitimate ways to build a kitchen. They just come from different ideas about what a kitchen is supposed to look like.

In-frame is how English cabinetmaking has been done for a long time. The frame is there because it is a strong, honest way to hang a door — the hinge screws into solid timber rather than into the side of a chipboard box. Frameless came out of German and Italian manufacturing in the second half of the last century, where the point was speed and repeatability. A frameless cabinet can be cut, drilled and assembled by machine in minutes, and a run of them can be produced to the same dimension again and again. It is a factory method, and a good one, but it is a different method with a different ancestry.

What it costs follows from how it is made. In-frame uses more timber, because you are building a frame as well as a box. It takes more hours, because every joint in that frame has to be cut, fitted and glued by hand. And it demands tighter tolerances, because a door sitting inside a frame has to be right to the millimetre or it will not close flush. For the same run of cabinets, expect in-frame to come in roughly twenty to thirty per cent more than frameless. That is not a mark-up for the name. It is the timber, the time and the accuracy, and you can see where it goes.

What you get for that money is a door that still closes properly in twenty years. The hinge is carried by the frame, not by the side of the cabinet, so the weight of the door is not slowly tearing a fixing out of a thin panel. You get visible joinery — the beads, the mitres, the way the frame meets the rail — which is the thing that makes a kitchen read as furniture rather than as cabinetry. And because the doors are hung in a frame and painted rather than foil-wrapped, you can repaint them in fifteen years instead of replacing them. A frameless door can be repainted too, but the frame is what makes the kitchen worth repainting.

Frameless is genuinely better at some things, and it is worth saying which. Because there is no frame eating into the opening, you get more usable space inside the cabinet — not a vast amount, but enough to matter on a shallow wall. The look is flatter and quieter, with nothing to interrupt the run of doors, which suits a modern room. And it sits more naturally in a newer house, where the walls are square, the corners are true and there is no period detail for a frame to answer to. None of that makes frameless superior. It makes it the right tool for a particular job.

So how do you choose. Three honest pointers, and none of them is about which is better. First, the age and style of the house: a Victorian terrace or a Georgian room has details that an in-frame kitchen will sit with, and a frameless one can look slightly foreign against them. Second, whether you want the kitchen to look like furniture or like architecture — like something that was made, or something that was designed. Third, how long you expect to keep it. If the answer is twenty years, the frame earns its cost back in longevity and in the option to repaint. If the answer is ten, frameless is the more honest spend.

We make both. The Classic and the Stone ranges are in-frame, built the way this describes, with the frame carrying the hinge and the doors sitting inside it. The Line range is frameless — slab doors, no frame, the same construction underneath but a flatter face. All three are made the same way, in the same workshop, by the same people, and the only thing that moves between them is the construction and the finish. You can see all three on the kitchens page.