I’m sure glad you’ve been helping me get some answers; thanks a ton. I wonder if you’re tired to death of answering more questions about your awesome house!!!

Juli

I went with a wenge veneer over plywood, and then maple for the unexposed parts on the insides. I would not recommend wenge. You’re better off going with something like quarter sawn oak veneer. Go to Pedini in Seattle to look at their modern stuff. It looks great. They actually use machined poplar veneer for most of their stuff and just stain it to look like other woods. Looks extremely uniform… almost too much so though. Again though, if I did it over again, I would use an oak veneer and stain it whatever color I wanted (espresso).

As for the distance from the counter to the island, it’s 4 feet. Plenty of space for us.

Thank you again,

Juli

We are in the process of choosing our cabinet wood and stain now and for some reason I’m having a difficult time making that decision. First of all, I just discovered that most flat front cabinets are made of veneer and not solid wood. For some reason I have always thought as solid wood cabinets the best and am having trouble choosing/adjusting. What kind of wood did you go with for your cabinets? Is it oak? We have looked at bamboo (stained medium-dark) and at cherry (which according to my architect shows too much movement for a modern home).
Any thoughts/ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Juli

I take Karl’s point about a true master cabinetmaker being able to hide mistakes and the imperfections and inherent inconsistencies that come from a custom made (not factory made) product, but I think that a limiting factor on many projects, even those with healthy budgets, is time (which equals money). In an ideal world, we would have found a master craftsman who would have produced impecable work, but given the amount of millwork for our build, I suspect we would have had to wait a long long time for the end result. Our millwork was the single biggest ticket item in our project. For what we paid, we probably could have employed a master craftsman full time for two years, but we needed to get into the house on a timely basis. The reality is that most people need to balance end result with timeliness, and sometimes, even in a high end custom home, the end result may suffer a bit in the interests of timeliness.

I don’t know whether this will make you feel any better about your experiences, but my contractor (who I think the world of) told me that on every job, the millwork is always a headache. It certainly was for us. We had what our architect called an “intense” millwork package. The only room without custom millwork (cabinets, wardrobes, built in bookshelves or desks) of some sort was the furnace room. We had a gruelling prolonged saga to get the cabinetry to the point where we could live with the remaining inconsistencies and flaws.

In our situation, our millwork supplier was under pressure to produce the stuff on time, and I think that the volume and time pressures affected the end result. (Our move in date was still delayed by the millwork, which is a common story.) The imperfections really bothered me initially because we paid a lot of money and I felt that we hadn’t gotten what we had bargained for, but I am much more philosophical now. The millwork enhances the functionality of our home, and everyone who visits tells me how great it looks. Only I notice the problems.

I have been superimpressed by the amount of research and thought that you’ve put into your own project. It sounds like a backwards compliment, but if you had problems with your millwork, it makes me feel that there was no way I could have avoided problems on my millwork. (Hope that comes across the way I intend.)

Congratulations on the house. It (and the millwork) look great.

That said, we’re at peace with the cabinets, guests would never know anything was unplanned, and they do look great in general.

The comments about the potential faults of spray finishes are spot-on. A much better approach that looks just as high-end, if not even better, is a hand-rubbed stain with a sprayed-on satin polyurethane protective topcoat.