By Ashley Goldman of The Gold Hive

Ashley Goldman is the writer and designer behind The Gold Hive, a home renovation and design blog rooted in her century-old California home.She's been chronicling slow, intentional renovations (and the occasional ambitious friend project!) for over a decade. This was her first project with iCabinetry and she has since returned for a second where she used cabinets to convert a garage into a living room, home office, and laundry space. Follow along at @thegoldhive or at thegoldhive.com.

I'm very picky about cabinets. It's an occupational hazard when you spend your time restoring old houses and thinking about what makes a kitchen feel like it was always meant to be there. And when it comes to kitchens specifically, I keep coming back to inset.

Inset cabinetry is the construction style where doors and drawer fronts sit inside the cabinet frame rather than on top of it. The door sits flush with the face of the box, making it look more like a piece of furniture. It's the older, more traditional method, and it instantly elevates new kitchens. With inset, the tolerances are tighter and there’s a precision to the fabrication to make it work.

The challenge has always been access. For a long time, if you wanted inset construction, you’d have to work with custom cabinet shops, lengthy timelines, and higher price tags.

Luckily, that's changed!

The Kitchen

My friends Caroline and Alex had a narrow galley kitchen. At 8 feet wide, it had been doing its best for years but coming up short. Storage was scattered and there were dead zones where space wasn’t usable. A door to the garage interrupted the kitchen's most functional wall. And there was no path to the backyard except through the garage. Yard access is critical for this Southern California household that likes to dine al fresco! The kitchen felt disconnected from the way they like to live.

The footprint wasn't changing. So the project became about doing as much as possible inside it: relocating the sink, removing the garage door and opening a new one to the backyard, reconfiguring the cabinet runs on both walls, and finally adding a dishwasher.

In the small space, we knew cabinets would be a main design element - so we leaned into giving them their own personality. Caroline had a very specific vision of cooking in "a farm cottage in the Italian countryside.” So, we wanted cabinets with a unique door style, old-world construction, and a soft cottage hue.

Why iCabinetry

iCabinetry is one of the few companies offering true inset cabinets that can be ordered online and arrive pre-assembled. That combination is truly rarer than it sounds.

Most online cabinet companies work in the overlay world, with doors that sit on top of the frame. It’s more forgiving to manufacture and ship. Inset requires tighter tolerances, and historically that's meant a local custom maker. However, iCabinetry sits in the middle: factory-grade inset construction, ordered direct, without a showroom markup or a months-long wait.

The cabinets showed up a mere nine weeks after we placed the order! Boxes were assembled and factory-painted, the doors were already hung and adjusted, and soft-close drawers were already installed. The contractor practically just set them in position and fastened them to the wall! It was the fastest kitchen install with the most bespoke look!

For Caroline and Alex's kitchen, we went with the Lafayette Inset line painted in Crystal Fog. iCabinetry mailed us physical finish samples on painted maple (not just paint chips!) to help us pick a color. We had over 60 paint and stain options which was enough to find exactly the right thing, yet not so many that we gave up and picked beige. The Lafayette door style has a pretty recessed panel detail that gives a nod to Caroline’s countryside vision, while still being modern.

The Designer Is Your Best Friend

Cabinet layout planning gets complicated fast. Filler widths, appliance clearances, upper cabinet proportions, corner solutions, and interior hardware placements are critically important but tricky to lay out. I love planning kitchens and yet I spiral trying to keep up with the math and the clearances.

iCabinetry includes a dedicated designer in the process, and ours handled all of it. I mean all of it. We sent a basic doodle of the room dimensions along with Caroline's wishlist and the designer ran with it. She came back with a tailored plan and 3D renderings, plus she stayed in the loop through every revision. Because we were designing a kitchen around cabinets, we had several back and forth revisions as we nailed down the door/sink/appliance placement. Having someone who could turn around updated configurations quickly was so valuable!

Throughout the design, she kept an eye out for smart places to have the storage work even harder. She specified deep drawers for pots and pans, a spice pull-out positioned right next to the range, and a narrow vertical cabinet for cutting boards and baking sheets. While the kitchen didn't get bigger, it definitely got better at being a kitchen.

What It Looks Like When Installed

The drawers are solid wood with dovetail joinery and undermount soft-close hardware. They feel as nice to open as they are to look at. When the doors close, they nest right into the cabinet frame with precision and ease.

Everything fits, like actually fits! Even the fridge and oven can both open at the same time without conflicting (which sounds minor until you've lived otherwise!) And did I mention they got a dishwasher, too?!

Inset cabinets are a non-negotiable for me in historic houses — the flush doors, the precision fit, the way they read as original rather than added. In newer construction they're a genuine upgrade. Either way, I'm so pleased that Caroline and Alex get to have the prettiest cabinets on the block. And we got here through an online order, a mailed finish sample, and a designer who never once made us feel like we were bothering her. Win, win, win.

Start Your Own Project

If you're planning a kitchen renovation and want inset construction, iCabinetry's Lafayette Inset line is where I'd start. Pre-assembled, designer included, true inset joinery.

Have you considered using kitchen cabinets in utilitarian spaces? I used the Value Semi Custom and iStyle Semi Custom Plus lines on a garage conversion for another friend and it turned out beautifully! You can read about that project here.)

The free design consultation is included and worth doing early, before you've locked in a layout. Use code GOLD35 for 35% off your cabinets.

More projects at thegoldhive.com and on Instagram at @thegoldhive.

All photos by Ashley Goldman / The Gold Hive.