Should I keep the original built-in cupboards in my bungalow kitchen?

Wherever they are sound, yes. Original Craftsman cupboards and butler's pantries are a large part of what these houses are valued for, and they are usually better made than anything that would replace them. We repair and rework them for modern use — new hardware, adjusted shelving, a rebuilt drawer box — and then design the new cabinetry to match, so the kitchen reads as one thing rather than as old and new sharing a room.

Port Huron, St Clair County, MI

Custom Cabinets in Port Huron, MI

Name: Maceri Woodworking
Address: 33628 Bayview Dr, Chesterfield, MI, 48047, US
Telephone: (586) 823-2887
Price range: $$

Port Huron has two kitchen problems and they need opposite answers. In the Craftsman bungalows and foursquares that make up so much of the city, the original kitchen was small, efficient and fitted with built-in cupboards. In the larger nineteenth-century houses it was a back service room with ten-foot ceilings.

In a bungalow the surviving evidence is usually still there — a butler's pantry with original cupboards, a plate rail, a run of glazed uppers that somebody half removed in the seventies. The right move is almost always to extend that language rather than replace it: quarter-sawn oak or painted frame-and-panel doors with the flat, square Craftsman reveal, simple hardware, glazed uppers where the originals were glazed, and a pantry rebuilt to work as storage again. It costs no more than a generic remodel and it keeps the thing that makes the house worth living in. In the big Military Street-era houses the brief flips to the one we handle in tall rooms everywhere: take the cabinetry to the ceiling so the run is proportioned to the room, use the upper tier for what you rarely reach, and match the new work to whatever original millwork survives nearby. Both types share the practical realities of old-house work — out-of-plumb walls, sloping floors, a chimney or a stack in the way — so everything is scribed and levelled to the room as found.

We measure the room and whatever original joinery survives together, because in a Craftsman house the existing cupboards are the design brief. Built and finished at our Chesterfield shop, about thirty miles down the river.

Port Huron is about thirty miles from our Chesterfield shop, at the north end of the river run we work every week.

Custom Cabinets questions from Port Huron homeowners

Should I keep the original built-in cupboards in my bungalow kitchen?: Wherever they are sound, yes. Original Craftsman cupboards and butler's pantries are a large part of what these houses are valued for, and they are usually better made than anything that would replace them. We repair and rework them for modern use — new hardware, adjusted shelving, a rebuilt drawer box — and then design the new cabinetry to match, so the kitchen reads as one thing rather than as old and new sharing a room.
What cabinet style is right for a Craftsman house?: Flat, square and honest. Shaker or plain frame-and-panel doors with a square reveal, quarter-sawn oak if you are keeping a stained scheme or paint if the house was originally painted, glazed uppers where the originals were glazed, and simple hardware. Craftsman interiors were deliberately plain compared with the Victorian houses a few streets away, and cabinetry that adds ornament works against the house.