DRAWERS OR CUPBOARDS? KITCHEN STORAGE PLANNING
Most kitchens do not run out of space. They run out of reachable space. There is usually a corner nobody can get into, a cupboard whose back half is a mystery, and a strip of dead panel below an appliance that could have held cutlery. A recent kitchen in Garthdee, Aberdeen made that point neatly: the room did not get any bigger, but the storage roughly doubled in usefulness.
Why drawers beat cupboards for most things
A base cupboard with a single shelf looks like a lot of storage. In practice you can only use the front third of it without emptying the front third first. Anything at the back is out of sight, and things at the back of a kitchen cupboard have a habit of staying there for years.
A drawer of the same width holds a similar volume but presents all of it at once. You look down into it rather than reaching into it. For pans, tins, crockery, food packets and utensils, that single difference is what makes a kitchen feel like it has more room. At SGM Kitchens we now push drawer-led layouts hard at the design stage, because the feedback is consistent: clients report far more usable storage even when the cabinet run is the same length as before.
The trade-offs are worth knowing. Drawers cost more than a cupboard of the same size, because you are paying for runners and boxes rather than a shelf. Very tall items — a stockpot, a food processor — still want a cupboard or a larder. And a drawer bank needs the floor to be level and the run to be set out accurately, or the fronts will not sit in line. That is fitting work, not cabinet work.
The spaces people forget
On the Garthdee project the client asked for something quite specific: a drawer beneath the larder oven. That spot is frequently given over to a plinth or a blank panel, and it is one of the easiest places to recover storage from. It was designed in from the start.
The same logic applies elsewhere. The space under a sink is usually chaos, but a U-shaped drawer around the waste pipe turns it into somewhere you can actually find things. Corners can take a pull-out rather than a fixed shelf. A narrow gap beside an appliance can hold trays and baking sheets on end. None of these are exotic — they are just decisions that have to be made before the units are ordered, because you cannot add them afterwards.
Storage and the feel of the room are the same decision
There is a second reason drawer-led layouts suit narrow rooms. Because you are not swinging cupboard doors into a walkway, the room stays passable while you are working in it. In a long, thin kitchen that is not a small detail.
The visual choices pull in the same direction. Light gloss doors and a light marble-effect worktop reflect what daylight there is. A continuous floor — in this case an oak-effect herringbone LVT laid down the length of the room — reads as one surface rather than a series of zones, which makes the space feel longer rather than sectioned. Handleless fronts remove a line of hardware from the elevation, so the run looks calmer. Add a couple of open shelves and you get somewhere to put the things you use daily without giving up a wall cabinet to them.
Storage planning, in other words, is not a separate exercise from the kitchen design. It is most of it.
Get the order of work right and the rest follows
Storage decisions have knock-on effects for other trades. Drawer banks change where you can put a socket. A larder position affects lighting. Flooring that runs under the units has to be sequenced correctly, and on this project the floor went down after the units and worktops but before the painter’s coats, so nothing was damaged twice.
That is easier when one company holds the whole programme. On the Garthdee kitchen installation, the labourers, electrician, plasterer, plumber, kitchen fitter, floor fitter and painter were all booked and sequenced by us, and the client — who had found managing several trades on a previous job stressful — did not have to coordinate anyone. They were away for the first week and the job simply carried on.
A short checklist before you order
If you are planning a kitchen, it is worth walking your current one with a notepad and answering four questions. What do you use every day, and is it currently within easy reach? Which cupboard do you dread opening? Where is your longest uninterrupted run of worktop, and is it next to the hob or the sink? And what is currently occupying the space below your oven?
The answers usually point straight at a drawer-led layout with one or two tall units — and they cost nothing to work out before the order is placed.
If you are thinking about a kitchen in Garthdee, Cults, Bieldside, Braeside or Banchory, SGM Kitchens will survey the room, plan the storage properly and quote for the kitchen and all the trades needed to fit it. Have a look through our project gallery to see finished work, then get in touch to arrange a free design consultation. SGM Kitchens is a Which? Trusted Trader — Which? Trusted Traders: https://trustedtraders.which.co.uk/businesses/sgm-kitchens-ltd/
