If you're planning to create a modern kitchen for your home, and you don't mind spending 5X-10X the amount of your hard-earned money on merely a “brand” for the same cabinets that you can find elsewhere for much less (modern kitchen cabinets aren't cheap by any means, but you can definitely spend upwards of 46% LESS through other manufacturers), then this article isn't for you…

By all means, spend your money 🙂 (Heck, we can charge you double for our cabinets if it makes you feel good!)

But if you're looking for a more reasonable approach to creating your modern kitchen, then keep reading…

Because in this article you're about to discover the truth behind:

  • The pricing of these “high-end” companies…
  • What you're REALLY paying all those extra dollars for (And no, these cabinets aren't made from “Magic Unicorn Wood”)…
  • How you can avoid spending thousands on hiring a designer for your kitchen…
  • What you can expect to pay for the installation of modern kitchen cabinets…
  • The warranty “joke” (most of the warranties are terrible for what you'd pay up front)…
  • The “Forever-&-A-Day” lead times…

So lets get started…

1. Why Are These Modern Kitchen Cabinet Manufactures So Damn Expensive?!

To be 100% honest with you…

We're not quite sure…

But let me qualify that by saying…

We know that many of these manufacturers are shipping cabinets from Germany, Spain, etc over to North America… And I totally understand shipping costs (we've shipped cabinets to upstate New York & to Hawaii from our Los Angeles facility, which costed about $1,000 per kitchen)…

But does it really cost $20k to ship cabinets from Germany to Santa Monica, CA?

I highly doubt it…

But what you're paying for from most of these companies is the brand name attached to the cabinets…

And because the company was founded in 1776 by someones great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather, they're apparently worth paying 10 times the amount any other manufacturer would charge for the same cabinets…

“We conducted a case study with the company that's considered to be the “Rolls Royce” of modern cabinetry against our in-house line of modern cabinets and discovered that FOR HIGH GLOSS WHITE CABINETS & BLUM HARDWARE, we were 46% less than they were, and that's including shipping…”

“So besides paying excruciating amounts of cold hard cash on the “brand”, what else am I getting with these companies?”

I'm glad you asked 🙂

2. Most People Are Shocked When They Find Out What Most Modern Kitchen Cabinets Are Made Of…

particle-boardOk, so Magic Unicorn Wood doesn't really exist, as I'm sure you already know (I'm a bit sarcastic, I get it lol)…

But many of our clients our blown away when they discover that they almost paid with their first born for materials that are relatively inexpensive to manufacture…

You ready?
Most modern kitchen cabinets are made from MDF or Chipboard, AKA Particle Board…

Yeah, it's the same stuff that cheap furniture manufactures use to sell their cheap furniture super cheaply…

But these “high-end” cabinet companies have simply changed the name of the material to chipboard or MDF (medium density fiberboard… Sounds fancy right?)

You can buy an unfinished 4'x8′ sheet of 3/4″ thick particle board from Home Depot for around $20…

Im sure I'll get nasty comments from some trolls about this, but it simply it is what it is…

blum drawer legraboxNow the good thing about these companies is that many of then use BLUM hardware… Some of them private label their hardware from BLUM to have their own logos and names on the hardware… But BLUM is top of the line across the entire industry…

All of their soft close hinges, drawers glides, horizontal door lifts, etc. are absolutely gorgeous and function just as beautifully… But they wouldn't make make cabinets for a 10×10 kitchen $80,000… That would be insane…

For our cabinets we use 3/4″ cabinet grade plywood with a melamine finish for the frames… It's much stronger material than particle board and is built to last for years…

3. How to Avoid The $5,000 Designer/Retainer Fee

Ok, so hiring someone like Jeff Lewis to design and remodel your entire house would be a dream, a costly dream, but a dream worth every penny…

But $5,000 for someone to plan and design your kitchen is a bit excessive… Now granted many of these companies use the $5,000 as a non refundable deposit that they'll credit to the purchase of your cabinets…

(This process isn't something exclusive to them: we charge our clients a non-refundable $500 fee to design and plan with the same offer of applying the design fee to the cabinet purchase. There's a good 15-30 hours that can go into a kitchen design, but spending $5,000 (upwards of $333/hr) up front on something you're not sure you're going to stick with is an expensive risk…)

But what if you change your mind? Again, You're out $5k… Period.

I mean, you'll get to keep the design and drawings, but you can do that with any kitchen designer for a much more reasonable rate…

4. Modern Kitchen Cabinet Installation Costs

In the same case study above, the companies preferred installation team would have costed $8,000… Thats $500 per cabinet for installation…

Now to be fair, labor for installing modern kitchen cabinets is expensive because there is a good amount of fine tuning to maintain clean lines & even reveals throughout the kitchen…

In simple terms, it's a ton of detail oriented work…

These aren't cabinet you buy off the shelf at Home Depot that you can hang in 60 minutes…

Our average installation for modern cabinets is approx $250/cabinet… Which for the kitchen in our case study that had 16 cabinets, came out to $4,000… and was scheduled for a 4-5 day install, depending on contingencies…

Now this per cabinet price covers complete cabinet installation: installation of drawers, drawers, hinges, drawer guides, soft close mechanisms, handles, filler, trims, moldings & toe kicks…

All in all it's expensive either way you look at it…

5. The “Joke” About Modern Kitchen Cabinet Warranties

So…

It's not really that funny…

It's more of a tragedy than anything…

From the case study we conducted above, not only did the cabinets from the “high-end” company cost $43,500 with an installation cost of $8,000 for 16 cabinets, it is only covered by a 5 year warranty… Now I don't know about you, but if I spent $51,500 on cabinets in my 12'x12′ kitchen, they better last until I'm dead…

But it even gets worse… That's the BEST warranty I found from some of these guys… The most common warranty amongst 12 companies we used in our case study was 2 YEARS…

My team and I were speechless… Especially since we're so used to handing out lifetime warranties on our cabinets like they're free samples at Costco…

6. How Long Does It Take To Make Kitchen Cabinets?

Apparently 16 weeks…

This was the average lead time for the companies in our case study… Some of them were a little better than others, but 16 weeks was the average…

In comparison with our in-house cabinets, we can have them manufactured and ready to ship in as little as 14 days…

Now to be fair, many of the larger companies have such long lead times because they're booked out for months at a time… Hey, when you want what you want, you'll wait…

But for most homeowners we've spoken to, they hate they're kitchen and want to get rid of it sooner rather than 16 weeks later…

This is why our teams have developed systems and processes to ensure that we offer a high quality product that we can get to our customers as quickly as possible…

And if you'd like to see samples of modern kitchen cabinets from us, or you'd like us to help with designing & planning your kitchen, simply fill our project request form here

And if you want to know what our case study kitchen looked like, you can scroll through the drawings below!

modern kitchen design

modern kitchen cabinets


Modern Kitchen Pros
Modern Kitchen Pros

Matthew Hamel is the Director of Marketing for Modern Kitchen Pros, LLC and started out as a kitchen designer for a small So Cal Kitchen Remodeling Company back in 2012. Since then he has designed and remodeled well over 300 kitchens and is now one of the lead designers for Modern Kitchen Pros. Matt loves working with clients 1 on 1 and has developed the ability to help homeowners come up with creative ways for maximizing both budget and space...