In kitchen design, less really is more—both to ease the visual clutter of a quick-to-get-messy room and also because you’ll probably save some money by thinking that way. Alex Kalita, designer at Common Bond Design, found this to be true when designing a new set of upper cabinet doors for her Brooklyn rental apartment’s kitchen, settling on smooth, minimal wood fronts to replace some of the shaker-style ones her landlord had chosen. Then came the question of knobs. “I didn’t want to buy hardware, and I was a little bit worried about continuity with the lower cabinets, so I just did one-inch finger holes,” she says. Aaron Black, the same woodworker she’d hired to fabricate the new cabinet fronts, drilled the holes for her, ensuring that they were the exact same diameter as the knobs on the cabinets she didn’t replace and also the exact same distance from each cabinet corner. Besides adding a certain clean, contemporary note to the overall cabinet system, the holes also saved her the pain of finding knobs she loved—and then shelling out for them.
