When you’re looking at a new set of kitchen cabinets, the details that can make or break them are almost always in the doors. Your cabinets can be beautifully built and finished, but if the attached doors don’t complement them in the style you want, you may not be as happy as you could be about your cabinets. Mullions and frame-only doors are a great way to add details to your cabinets, and they come in all sorts of styles.

First, a disclaimer: as we ship our products all over North America, we do not provide the glass to go in your doors. Simple glass panes for cabinet doors are usually quite inexpensive locally, and are much less likely to break in transit.

A classic way to add glass into your doors while still saving some money is by selecting what’s called a “Frame-Only” door. Most of our doors have two main components: a frame and a panel. The frame is the outside perimeter of the door and is what provides most of its structure. When you select “Frame-Only,” we remove the panel from the door and prep the space to receive a glass pane. This option is typical for Shaker-style doors for a relatively simple look, and is often also used in cabinets where you want the contents to be displayed as clearly as possible. If you have a door with multiple panels, we can also keep some panels as wood and some prepped for glass. When matching door openings with transom windows or other narrow top sections, this is a common option.

Now, we can get into the fancier options. Mullions (sometimes referred to as “Grilles”) are a way of adding details to your glass-paneled cabinet doors by adding wooden strips that subdivide the panel area of a door. The most common mullion design is called the “Standard Lite,” which divides your door into 4, 6, 8, 10, or 12 evenly sized sections, or “lites.” For most cabinet doors, 6-lite designs are the way to go, dividing your panel into two columns and three rows. We also offer “Offset Lite” mullions, which create a 2” margin of smaller lites around a larger central piece.

From there, mullion designs can become increasingly complex, and can include curves, arches, and other potentially complicated geometry. However, the prospect of math isn’t worth being afraid of, as your account manager and our Special Designs department can help make sure everything will work the way you want. We’ll even send detailed schematics of each door to get your approval. For reference, the mullion options that don’t require custom work are the Diamond, Double Diamond, Double X, Double X Horizontal, Triple X, Triple X Horizontal, and X-Lite.

Remember, don’t be intimidated by the technical details if mullions are the accessory you want in your kitchen cabinet doors. We’re here to help make sure your glass doors reflect the care and attention they deserve.