Designing and Making Walnut Kitchen Cabinet Doors

We received the request to produce Cabinets with walnut veneer doors for the kitchen and mud room project in Shoreline,WA.

This is the image I sent to our veneer coordinator to explain my inspiration. This particular kitchen was built by Henrybuilt. We were looking for a plain slice grain with some good color variations. This image perfectly matched with the inspiration that I was having. They build really perfect walnut doors and panels. I can't say enough how beautiful they are.

We work with small veneer company in Japan. They take care of everything from slicing logs to making doors. All veneers are hand-picked and layed. The results are always amazing!

The first process that we go through is to decide how we are going to lay the veneers. I　sent an project drawing with some details such as wood grain directions with inspiration images. Sending the drawing is critical so that we can keep the same design of veneers throughout projects to avoid "the mismatch." This is the picture I got as the response.

I was really happy to see nice grain patterns and color variations. While the shop coordinated the veneer design, they also estimated their inventory to make sure that they have enough veneers to carry through the entire project. We got confirmation that an entire project could be produced with the same lots of veneers. The production finally starts after this discussion.

Each panel is carefully checked and inspected to verify all the details like dimensions, directions etc. These are hand measured and cut. So, the problems can happen more often than we imagine.

Perfect colors and wood grains!Once finished, the wood grain shows even more characters.

Hopefully, I can collect some pictures from my client once the project is done. We hope you could see a little bit of our production process.