Add your favourite materials here after browsing the material list below. You can also populate the favourite materials by clicking on customer projects in the Gallery. Favourite materials are then used in the Cabinet Designer.

The material list can be daunting but let's start with what we consider to be the starting point. White melamine faced chipboard (which we call simply White) is good quality, cost-effective and fits with lots of colour schemes.

If you would prefer a wood grain effect finish then something like our material 'Oak' is popular.

Both White and Oak are high quality melamine faced chipboard (MFC) materials. Melamines are a go to material for fitted furniture because they have good wear characteristics, they don't need finishing with varnish/paint etc and the economics are good. Read more about the quality of MFC

Beyond the melamines, a material and aesthetic we find very popular is Birch Ply. This is a hardwood ply with pleasing laminations and typically an inset door configuration is used to show off the laminations.

Getting into the premium finishes, high gloss products include the lacquered boards and acrylic laminates. Usually with high gloss, a cheaper non-gloss material is used for the carcasses and just the frontages (doors and drawer faces) are in the high gloss.

Painted finishes

When we talk about painting cabinetry we are referring to two different approaches:

Priming

We can apply a water based primer in the factory. Usually MDF is the best substrate for this and our part code for this combination is WHITEPRIMED18. If you want cabinetry to match your existing decor this is a good approach as all the hard work regarding material preparation is done for you in the factory: the MDF edges are sealed with edge-banding meaning that the absorbency of the edges is the same as the faces leading to a high quality finish and the primer means you can go straight to top coat. To make you workload even easier choose melamine for the carcasses and restrict the painting to frontages only (doors and drawer faces).

Lacquer

If you are looking for a ready finished paint in the colour of your choice then we can offer two-pack polyurethane lacquer in a semi-matt or high gloss finish. This is a high-quality 'factory finish' which shouldn't need repainting during the lifetime of the furniture. This kind of quality level can be achieved only in a factory environment.

The colour matching system for lacquer finishes is well developed. We find paints from companies such as Farrow and Ball and Little Greene popular with our customers and just using the product name such as "Cook's Blue" we can get a computer mixed lacquer. Also lacquer can be mixed to particular RAL colour e.g RAL 9003 "Signal White"

If you are working with melamines and lacquer finishes together then Egger produce a resource detailing how melamine colours relate to RAL numbers. For example Egger U606 Forest Green laminate matches with RAL6005. Review the colour match document on the Egger website

Sometimes we receive specifications where the finish is stated as 'nothing special, just a couple of coats of eggshell'. We don't offer this! Eggshell and similar paints that an on-site decorator might use don't work well in a bespoke factory environment for two reasons i) the drying time is too long ii) the end result in terms of texture and durability is nowhere near as good as lacquer.