This week we’re launching a new series on kitchen cabinet doors, starting with our favorite (we’ll admit it): the Shaker-style cabinet front.
For advice on getting the Shaker-style look in your own kitchen, we turned to the experts.

Above: A dark green London kitchen from deVOL‘s Real Shaker Kitchen line mixes Shaker-style cabinet fronts with more traditional molding and tongue-and-groove paneling. Helen Parker, creative director of deVOL, says, “You can’t possibly go wrong with Shaker cabinets.”
What is a Shaker-style cabinet front"

Above: Architect Elizabeth Roberts commissioned Shaker-style cabinets from Wood Mode for a gut renovation of an 1852 single-family home. The cabinets are painted in Newport Green by Benjamin Moore. (For more, see Indoor/Outdoor Living, Brooklyn-Style.) Photograph by Dustin Aksland, courtesy of Elizabeth Roberts. First, a bit of history: The Shakers were a religious group that fled to the American colonies in the eighteenth century to establish a utopian society, which included making all their own furniture.  Simplicity, utility, and honesty were the hallmarks of Shaker style, as well as attention to form and proportion.
Technically, a Shaker-style cabinet front is a “five-piece door with a four-piece frame?two stiles on the left and right, two rails on the top and bottom, and a flat, inset panel,” according to John McDonald, founder of SemiHandmade, a company that makes Shake...