Choosing Kitchen Cabinets
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Cabinet manufacturers understand this and try to help us make these choices. Merillat is one particular cabinet maker that offers some tools on on their website to do just that.
They recently updated their "What's My Style" quiz to help you identify your particular style and hopefully narrow your range of product choices to a manageable level.
They also provide an online planner called their ideaFOLIO. It's basically a virtual file folder that allows you to save pictures and other information related to Merillat's cabinet door styles, knobs and organizational features.
Do these tools actually help you with choosing kitchen cabinets? Let's take a look.
Determining Your "Style"
Merillat's website features a "What's My Style" quiz intended to help you discover which decorative style you lean toward. The possibilities include formal traditional, contemporary, country traditional and eclectic.
The quiz asks 11 questions about your preferences on things like the style of your dream home, the type of artwork you'd hang on the wall and the style of dinnerware you prefer. Answers are multiple choice in the form of clickable pictures. At the end of the quiz you're presented with a results page that identifies your style and provides links for browsing through various cabinet products.
Does it help? Personally, I found it to be less effective than I'd hoped mainly because at the end, although you now "know" what your style preference is, you're still provided with the same broad array of products from which to start browsing. It's not as if the quiz (or the software behind it) whittles down your range of product options and directs you to those in that style category.
Choosing Kitchen Cabinets Using The Photo Gallery
Merillat's photo gallery is another tool designed to help you see the range of products that are available. What's helpful here is that this is where you can choose the style category you want and narrow down the choices based on your selections. Pick your style, room type and color variation and you're presented with photos of cabinets in actual settings that meet those criteria.
Or, just leave the search selections blank and browse through the whole range of photos. Seeing the cabinets in actual room settings gives a better sense for the look and feel that a given door style and color offers.
Clicking on any picture brings you to the page that highlights the particular cabinet line/door style featured in the photo. These product pages supply more details about the available finishes and features and also offer additional photos of the cabinets. If you click on any of the available finishes for that product, the accompanying in-room photo also changes to reflect that finish.
I was impressed with how well the website's software handled the ability to change the finish color. It rendered a realistic look complete with shadows and shading and didn't looking flat. Some websites that offer a similar feature aren't as good at this and present less convincing images.
Merillat's ideaFOLIO
The ideaFOLIO is a handy feature that helps organize your favorite items and ideas that you want to keep as you browse the Merillat site. But to take advantage of it you first need to register and create an account.
The signup process is simple and all it requires is your email address and a password. I had some initial reservation about giving my email address, thinking I'd be swamped with unwanted solicitations. But as it turned out that hasn't happened and I haven't encountered any other problems to-date.
Once your account is created you're brought to your folio page. You can edit your profile, log out or begin to browse. Once nice feature of the folio is that it contains links to browse various products and cabinet features like door styles, photos, organizational accessories and hardware. Just click on the link and you're ready to browse.
As you surf through the various products you have the option of saving any item to your folio by clicking on the little "save" button. I liked the fact that I could easily click on the cabinet organizers that I liked and they'd be ready for me to either print or review later on.
The folio is divided into tabs that you create to organize your shopping by category. You can name one of them "kitchen" for example and another "bath" to segregate products you want to set aside for each room. Another handy feature is the ability to share each tab through email, which makes it easy to send your ideas to a family member or a kitchen designer if you're working with one. There's also the option to print an entire tab or just specific items contained within a tab.
The final verdict on whether these types of tools help with choosing kitchen cabinets resides with each user. For me, the style quiz wasn't very helpful. I know what I like and don't like, and putting a name on whatever style best classifies my preferences isn't important to me.
For others, it might provide some benefit. At a minimum it gives you an understanding of how Merillat categorizes their products and you can use that information to narrow down your choices when using the photo gallery.
I found the ideaFOLIO to be useful, since it helps segregate the items you're interested in and those you're not. You could do this on your own by just taking notes but the ease in which you can simply save an item to the folio is very convenient in my opinion.
Whether it's choosing kitchen cabinets or any other product, no software or other tool for that matter can actually choose for you. But any tool that makes the process easier, by organizing and helping you select and deselect is a benefit. Merillat's effort at helping choose cabinets may not hit a home run but its useful features make it worth a look. Merillat's website is www.merillat.com.
More information and help with choosing kitchen cabinets is available here. It gives you a good primer on things you should consider when shopping for cabinets, helping you to become a more informed buyer. That can help you make the right cabinet decisions and possibly save money in the process.
Robert Levesque
Publisher/Editor
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