Shaker Cabinet Doors

The standard is explicit about grain: stiles run the full height of the door with vertical grain, and rails run between the stiles with horizontal grain. Solid wood changes dimension very little along the grain and a great deal across it — the USDA Forest Products Laboratory’s Wood Handbook is the reference our wood movement guide works from — so a frame built this way changes almost nothing in height and only the width of its members in width. The frame is the stable part of the door: it carries the hinge cups, registers against the box or face frame, and sets the outline every reveal is measured from.

The panel is the unstable part, and the standard treats it accordingly. A flat panel must be at least 6.4 millimetres, a quarter inch, thick at every grade. At Premium grade the standard does not permit solid lumber flat panels at all; at Custom and Economy grade it permits an edge-glued solid lumber panel only when it is at least 12.7 millimetres thick and 350 millimetres, or 13.75 inches, wide or less. Wider than that, or at Premium grade, the panel is a veneered stable core, which does not move with the seasons the way a wide solid board does.

Whichever panel is used, the standard requires that it have adequate space to move, float, expand or contract with changes in ambient humidity regardless of how it is retained, and that panel cores never be exposed. The panel is cut slightly smaller than the groove-to-groove dimension of the frame, left unglued, and held centred at the mid-point of the rails only. A panel glued hard into its frame is the most common fault we find in shaker doors from other sources; the symptom is a split panel or a cracked corner joint after the first dry summer. The joints that hold the corners square — the haunched mortise and tenon the standards assign to panelled doors, or its cope-and-stick equivalent — are covered in our joinery guide.

Under an opaque finish the panel is almost always MDF, and the reason is the finish rather than the cost. A paint film shows every telegraphed grain line and every hairline where a solid panel has shrunk from its frame, as our finish systems guide explains; MDF is flat out of the press and does not move seasonally. The standard recognises the construction: for opaque-finish doors it requires MDO to be edgebanded at Premium grade, permits MDF edges to be filled or edgebanded at the manufacturer’s option at Premium, and requires all edges filled or edgebanded at Custom and Economy. The frame stays hardwood, because it carries the hinge cups and the groove.

Under a transparent finish the rules tighten. At Premium and Custom grade the panel grain must run vertically and adjacent door panels must match for colour and grain; at Premium the frame stock must be well matched for colour, and at Custom and Economy solid stock and veneer panels must be compatible in colour. A stained shaker kitchen is therefore a sorting exercise before it is a finishing one: the panels for one elevation cut from matched material, the frames from stock sorted for colour, and the whole run laid out on the bench before assembly.

The postwar and late-century subdivisions that make up most of the housing in Placer, Sacramento and El Dorado counties — Roseville, Rocklin, Folsom, Granite Bay, El Dorado Hills — were built with overlay raised-panel doors or a builder’s version of them. A painted shaker door in overlay is the natural replacement: lighter than what it replaces, at ease with the house, and at home on either a face frame or a frameless box. The same is true of the ranch houses of Walnut Creek and Lafayette and of most of the Bay Area’s 1970s and 1980s housing.

In the Craftsman bungalows of Land Park, Curtis Park, Berkeley and Palo Alto’s Professorville, a flat-panel door in quartersawn white oak was the original cabinet door, and a wide-rail shaker inset in a face frame is a faithful one; the original built-ins are the proportion guide, as our Craftsman bungalow guide explains. In Tudor and Colonial Revival houses a painted shaker inset is a quieter choice than the raised panel the house would also accept, and often the better one in a working kitchen.

Where shaker does not belong is the mid-century house. The Eichler tracts of Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Walnut Creek, Orinda and San Mateo and the post-and-beam houses of the Marin and Peninsula hills were built with flush slab fronts, and a shaker door in one of those kitchens is the most common mismatch we are asked to correct. Our slab doors spoke covers the right door for those houses, and our mid-century and Eichler kitchens guide covers the houses. The beaded inset spoke covers the pre-war house whose face frame carries a bead.