This kitchen cabinet style — a flat-panel door covered in laminate, with full-width oak pulls at the top — golly, there were a lot of these. If you need a replacement — or maybe, you’re ready to lead this 1980s revival in your kitchen or how about a craft room? — you can still get replacements. You can also get the doors sans wood trim. The source: Woodmont Doors from Eclectic-Ware.
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I have yet to visit ReStore that they didn’t have stacks of these.
Yep.
Exactly, Pam. These were wildly popular for the “Euro” look. Also one of the first to utilize the hidden hinges too. Arctic White was usually the laminate along with a hardwood edge pull. Very 80s! Great resourcing post!
I rented an apartment that had these in salmon pink with matching salmon pink countertops. It was kind of salmon pink overload.
I have these without the wood trim – 20 years, still going strong. I just re-painted them and with new knobs they’re good as new. And being just a plain flat panel with no moulding, they’re super-easy to keep clean. But I’m not sure why anyone would want replacements for the ones pictured here, they’re horrible! All I ever see is how to paint/wallpaper over or some other decorating trick to make them look completely different.
ugh, I painted my 80’s laminate/oak cabinet doors so I didn’t have to live with them until we could afford to replace our kitchen. Once painted I actually don’t mind the shape of them so they’ll be good for the next 5-8 years.
We went with avocado green lowers and white uppers and replaced the blue laminate countertop with grey laminate. Painting really made a difference on how I feel about the kitchen!
I also recommend looking on local selling sites (Craigslist/kijiji etc) . We were planning to add some extra cabinets and I was looking for matching doors to my existing kitchen and found an entire kitchen’s worth of doors on kijiji.
Unfortunately, since they were free the people giving them away didn’t want us to take the time to measure anything and none of the doors ended up working once we got them home. Long story short, make sure you measure and know exactly what you need when you go to pick doors up 🙂
I don’t have a photo of the whole kitchen since we haven’t finished dealing with the floors but here’s how we updated our cabinets.
It’s temporary until we can afford to replace the kitchen with something more mid-mod (most likely teak door fronts, though I’m still split between doing a bright colour on the bottom and teak uppers or doing all wood)
https://www.instagram.com/p/BOaFMGzDTKb/?taken-by=stream1313
I never disliked these cabinets as much as some people, and now a lot of people have a really almost visceral negative reaction toward these.
I think it was because they were really common for a period of time and you’d see versions of this in everything from high end late-modernist-contemporary, to the most depressing low budget townhouse.
And people make their associations from the more negative examples like the small galley kitchen where everything was “almond” and it was lit by a single fluorescent troffer in the ceiling. Sometimes this doorstyle could be really depressing, but it’s mostly that the whole context was not so pretty.
But I’ve seen these in large contemporary time capsules where they look good. And walnut with a different color laminate or a paint color could be really great. I have seen what was probably a custom variation regionally where the top drawer faces were wood and the counter runs were radiused so there was a sinuous band of wood running around the kitchen. It was handsome.
I am not sure that people are quite ready for this one to come back….this may be similar to “pink bathroom” 10-15 years ago, people respond negatively to the description, not to what it actually looks like in the space.
Soo 80s. I was not even a fan of them even then. But like someone said above if you painted the wood line a color or painted the door and wood line contrasting colors, then it would look pretty cool beyond the bleh 80s-style door shown above. Like Ben Carson?? did in that cool 70s’s style apartment in NY when he made the kitchen white and lime green.
NY time-capsule he decorated.
Ben Sander 🙂 https://retrorenovation.com/2015/12/08/1970s-bathroom-kitchen-design/
This reminds me of all the Techline furniture my aunt and her architect husband tastefully decorated their house with when I was young. It can look good when done right! They used a lot of white laminate in their mid-century home and it always looked so clean and modern and really fit with the house.
It might be kind of cool to add a retro looking laminate to these for a hobby room or laundry room. I wonder how hard that would be…
I appreciate ineffablespace’s comment because I’m one of those who does have a “visceral negative reaction”, and it really is all about context. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the design. However, a huge ’80s-’90s boom of apartment complexes and townhouses in my area resulted in this becoming virtually the only cabinet style available to a majority of renters. It remains nearly inescapable for anyone renting between the extreme opposite high and low end properties. So for me, I don’t feel laminate cabinets are ready for a comeback because they’ve not yet gone away.
Oh no! I know I’m not ready for these to come back, but thanks for a good resource for those who are! This is truly one “dated” (that dreaded word!) look that really deserves the adjective, imo. It sure didn’t help that these style of cabinets were usually constructed of ivory laminate over cheap particle board and found in every apartment, like, forever, often in less than wonderful settings. Still… can’t see folks in 10 yrs trying to revisit this particular ’80s trend!
Unfortunately some of the modifications I have seen done to these doors in an attempt to update them has had the effect of transforming them from ubiquitous and bland or clumsy looking cabinet doors to jacked up bland and clumsy looking cabinet doors.
Some of the fixes are good, many of them are not so good. Everybody can tell that they are still this door: the profile is very distinctive.
I think the problem is that their most common color, “almond” was never really a design winner. If these had been available in colored laminate, I think people might not h— them so much.
I know I keep chiming in, but the more I think of it, the more I think it is really the almond laminate that causes the primary objection.
I’ve seen these doors with all wood faces, and there are versions of this door through companies like Seimatic, where the entire door is one lacquered finish (usually in very bright white, or an actual color) with the profiles routed into the slab, and people don’t seem to find them so objectionable.
And the metal and laminate version of these doors with a metal edge pull rather than oak has never really been out of production.
I have a visceral response specific to my cabinets because they replaced beautiful 1960’s birch cabinets with amazing midcentury knobs. We have 2 of the original cabinets in the garage and I can picture how beautiful a whole kitchen would have been with them. I can’t believe the original owners replaced them with these 80’s cabinets :/
You can definitely tell my kitchen cabinets are still this style but painting them out made me feel better about them in general. So maybe if they’d had better colours to choose from or the all wood version the kitchen wouldn’t have looked so bad.
The colour as you mentioned was also a huge factor in the appeal. The cabinets in combination with the beige backsplash (complete with cornucopia of fruit!), dusty blue countertop, beige sheet linoleum and light yellow walls made the whole kitchen feel dirty.
I also think that poor quality is also associated with this cabinet style. I’ve seen so many examples of this kitchen falling apart that I probably associate poor quality with all kitchens of this type which is wrong since like with any style there are cheap and high end versions. My cabinets are in great shape for being 30-37 years old and they would probably last for a while yet.
While I’m itching to replace my cabinets with something more mid-mod looking I’ll just have to wait.
I linked to the Formica UK site instead of the US site.
They have 120 plain color (colour) offerings including a few really nice pale blues, a pale yellow
and pale pink :-/.
I wish we couldn’t even open sites that have great stuff we can’t get
Why does Formica have such better colors in foreign countries. 🙁
I saw a picture of a kitchen with these, and the wood strips had been painted, and they looked fantastic.
Hi, Pam, It was great to see this info about replacements for the Euro cabinets.
I am a REALTOR in a large New Mexico town, and there are a number of 1980’s homes that still have these cabinets….some look good….others, not so much.
Some 80’s homes have been renovated and these cabinets are GONE!!!
I would like to share this basic info with my fellow REALTORS, I can get the basics to fit on one side of an 8 x 11 sheet of paper…..just need your permission to share.
Thank you in advance.
I admit it, I’m freaked out that an ’80s revival is being discussed in a retro design site.
I’m also freaked out that there’s an ’80s revival. Those cabinets—PLEASE NO!
I’ve had these cabinets in numerous apts over the years. I liked the practicality of them. No extra handle to catch clothes & ease of clean up. The fact that they are streamlined & not a lot of design with wood grain made it easy to decorate. They’re not everyone’s preference, but they have their positives.