Cabinet Door Overlay and Reveals

Two words, one gap

Stand in front of a cabinet run and look at any vertical line between two doors. That line is the reveal. Now look at the door on either side of it: whatever the door is covering behind that line is the overlay. Push the door across by a millimetre and the reveal loses a millimetre while the overlay gains one. They are the same fact.

Which word a shop uses tells you which construction it builds. Face frame shops talk in overlay, because there is a visible frame and the useful question is how much of it the door hides. Frameless shops talk in reveal, because there is nothing to hide and the useful question is how big the line between fronts should be. If someone quotes you a door in overlay and you build frameless, translate it before you cut anything.

Full, half and inset

Full overlay covers as much of the front as the hardware allows, leaving only a fine line between fronts. On a face frame cabinet that is often somewhere around 1 1/4 in of overlay per door, which leaves a narrow strip of stile between two adjacent cabinets. It is the closest a framed kitchen gets to the frameless look, and it is what most people mean when they say they want a clean modern face on a traditional box.

Partial overlay deliberately leaves the frame showing. The industry default is commonly around 1/2 in, and you will also hear it sold as half overlay or three-quarter overlay, named for the share of the frame member each door covers. The names get confusing because the same word does two jobs: on a hardware shelf, "half overlay" also describes the hinge you use when two doors meet on one shared partition and each door can only have half of it. Read which sense is meant from the context.

Inset puts the door inside the opening so the fronts sit flush with the frame. The reveal is the whole design: usually about 1/16 to 1/8 in, even on all four sides, and consistent from cabinet to cabinet. Nothing hides an error, which is why it costs more everywhere, in the shop and on site.

Sizing a frameless door

On a frameless cabinet the door covers the whole front of the box, so you size it from the outside of the box, not from the opening. Pick your reveal first and use it everywhere.

One door on the cabinet. Door width = cabinet width minus one reveal. The door is short by one gap, and that gap is what separates it from the next cabinet's door. Height works the same way: door height = cabinet height minus one reveal, unless you are leaving a gap at the top and bottom as well, in which case subtract both.

Two doors on one cabinet. Take the cabinet width, subtract one reveal for the outside gap and one for the gap between the pair, then split what is left in half. On a 900 mm cabinet with a 3 mm reveal that is 900 minus 3 minus 3, which is 894, so each door is 447 mm.

A stack of drawer fronts. Same idea vertically. Subtract one reveal for the gap under the bottom front and one for each gap between fronts, then divide the rest by the number of fronts, or by whatever proportion you want if the fronts are not equal. Uneven drawer heights are normal and look deliberate as long as the gaps are identical.

That last point is the one that matters most. In a frameless kitchen, nobody notices that a door is 447 mm wide. Everybody notices that one gap is 3 mm and the next is 5 mm. Consistency beats any particular number, so pick one reveal for the whole job and hold it.

Sizing a face frame door

Here you work from the opening in the frame, and you add rather than subtract. Door width = opening width plus twice the overlay. Door height = opening height plus twice the overlay, unless the top or bottom is treated differently.

For a single door on an opening 14 in wide with 1/2 in overlay: 14 plus 1/2 plus 1/2, so a 15 in door. For a pair of doors on a 30 in opening at 1/2 in overlay, the two doors together span 31 in, and they have to share a gap between them, so subtract the gap you want, usually 1/8 in, and split. Each door lands at 15 7/16 in.

Where face frame sizing gets a name of its own is the shared partition. When two cabinets sit side by side with one stile between them and a door on each side, neither door can have a full overlay, because they would fight over the same wood. Each gets roughly half the stile, which is exactly the case the half-overlay hinge exists for. Get the hinge right and the arithmetic follows; get the hinge wrong and no door size saves you.

Inset is the exception to the addition rule: the door is smaller than the opening, not larger. Door width = opening width minus two reveals. On a 14 in opening with a 3/32 in reveal, the door comes out at 13 13/16 in, and it has to be that within the thickness of a pencil line.

What the hinge decides

You can pick any overlay you like on paper. The hinge is what decides whether the door can actually sit there, and this is the part that people meet the hard way, after the doors are bored.

On a European cup hinge, three things set the overlay together. The first is the boring distance, how far in from the door edge the 35 mm cup is drilled, usually a few millimetres. The second is the mounting plate height, which is how far the plate stands proud of the cabinet side. The third is the hinge crank: a straight-arm hinge gives full overlay, a half-cranked one gives the twin or half case, and a full-cranked one gives inset.

Blum publishes these as a chart rather than a formula, and the chart behaves like a simple relationship: overlay goes up as boring distance goes up, and down as plate height goes up, with a fixed offset per crank type. Increase the boring distance by a millimetre and you gain a millimetre of overlay. Move from a 0 mm plate to a 3 mm plate and you lose three. That is why an installer with a box of plates can rescue a run that is slightly off, and why swapping a plate for whatever was on the shelf can quietly change every door on a cabinet.

If you would rather not read a chart, our hinge calculator takes the overlay you want and gives you the cup position and plate to get it, for frameless and face frame cabinets both.

Where it goes wrong

Four failures account for most of the doors that come back.

Overlay measured per door instead of per edge. Someone reads "1 in overlay" and makes the door 1 in bigger than the opening rather than 2 in. Every door in the job is short by an inch, and it is only obvious once they hang.

The end of the run forgotten. The door at the end of a bank has a neighbour on one side and open air on the other. If you size it with two gaps it will be narrow by one, and the end of the run will show a wider line than everywhere else.

The reveal chosen before the box is checked. A 2 mm reveal on cabinets that are 1 mm out of square gives you gaps that visibly taper. Either build tighter or open the reveal, but do not hope.

Wood movement ignored on inset. A solid wood inset door in a dry winter can rattle in an opening it was tight in during a damp summer. Frame-and-panel construction exists to control that, and inset in a slab of solid wood is asking for trouble.

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