European-style Cabinetry
European or 32mm cabinetry (based on the standard hole spacing) came out of a peculiarly European tradition. In parts of Europe, cabinets were made to easily knock-down so they could be removed from the house during a move. You moved your cabinets along with your furniture. Special knock-down fittings and hinges that allowed the use of doors without face frames made it easy to take your cabinets apart and stack them up for moving. It also made manufacture very simple, especially with the advent of computer controlled machinery and high quality panel stock.
There are several advantages to Euro-style cabinets over traditional face frames. Face frames take up space and limit access to the entire interior of the cabinet. Euro-style cabinetry has a sleek appearance caused by the fact that all visible surfaces are covered by the door or drawer front. A comparable width face frame lower cabinet will have much smaller drawers than its Euro counterpart because the drawers must fit in between the frames. In a typical lower four drawer cabinet the difference is over one square foot of lost storage space.
Euro cabinets are becoming much more prevalent in the US as factories come on line with the Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) machinery required to make the many standard parts. The system has a great deal of flexibility for shelving, inserts, drawers and other interior features due to a universal system of holes, drawer slides, hinges and other hardware. The hinges used have a double action that brings the door towards you, clearing adjacent doors before it starts to swing and allowing you to open doors up to 180 degrees. This makes more of the interior accessible, especially important on lower cabinets where there is often wasted space.
This also allows fuller access to the interiors than available on face frame cabinets.
Your choice of cabinet construction should be based on function and how they will integrate with existing cabinetry. Mixing Euro with face frame can result in an odd pastiche of styles or work well dependent on the surfacing used. Even custom cabinetry made specifically for your kitchen will likely come from one of these two schools.
