The smartest thing we tell our clients? Spend less on what’s hidden.
There’s a question we get asked constantly: how do you get a kitchen that looks genuinely considered, genuinely well-made, without spending the kind of money that keeps you up at night? After twenty years designing and building kitchens in London, our answer is usually the same. And it surprises people.
Start with IKEA.
The part of your kitchen nobody sees
Here’s something most kitchen designers won’t tell you:
The carcasses, the boxes that make up your cabinets, live behind closed doors. Literally. Once your fronts are on, you’ll never look at them again. Your guests won’t either. The material they’re made from, the finish inside the cabinet, the brand name on the hinge — none of it makes any difference to how your kitchen looks or feels day to day. What you see and touch every single day are the fronts. The doors. The drawer faces. The panels. That’s where your money should go. IKEA Metod cabinets are, in our view, the best value carcass on the market. They’re well-engineered, widely available, and they come with a 25-year guarantee. The hinge system is reliable. The sizing is consistent. For the price, nothing comes close. So when clients come to us with a budget that has limits, we tell them: buy IKEA cabinets, and put the money you’ve saved into fronts that are worth looking at.
What cheap fronts actually look like
We’ve seen enough kitchens to know immediately when a front is doing its job and when it isn’t. Standard IKEA fronts are fine. But there’s a ceiling to them. The material tells its own story — and not always the one you want. You can see it in the way light falls across a flat painted surface, in the weight of the door as it opens, in the way the edges meet. It’s not bad. It’s just not considered. A front made from real wood veneer, or laminated birch plywood with an exposed edge, or painted MDF finished properly — these things have presence. Weight. They look like someone thought about them. Because someone did. The difference isn’t subtle once you know what you’re looking at.
The detail that changes everything
If there’s one thing that separates a kitchen that looks genuinely bespoke from one that’s just well-painted, it’s the handle. Specifically: the integrated handle. A flat painted front can be many things. Without the right handle, it can read as builder-grade, safe, unremarkable. Add an integrated handle — cut directly into the body of the door, running the full width or height — and the whole kitchen shifts. It becomes architectural. It becomes intentional. There’s no faking it, and you can’t achieve it with off-the-shelf hardware. It’s one of those details that costs relatively little in the context of a full kitchen but does a disproportionate amount of work. Every time we specify it, clients feel the difference the moment they touch it.
What this looks like in practice
A client comes to us wanting a kitchen that feels genuinely designed. They have a real budget but not an unlimited one. Here’s roughly how we think about it:
IKEA Metod cabinets:
Solid, reliable, cost-effective. Buy them, configure them to your layout, and don’t feel any guilt about it whatsoever.
Bloq fronts:
This is where the kitchen becomes yours. Choose a collection based on the material and finish that suits the space. MONO for a clean, painted finish in any of our colours (colour match on request), LINEA for added architectural presence, PLANE or PALISADE if you want the warmth of real wood veneer. STRATA if you want something more tactile and architectural — laminated birch plywood with an exposed edge that makes the material itself the feature.
Handles:
Go integrated if you can. It’s the single upgrade that punches hardest above its weight.
The result is a kitchen that looks like it cost considerably more than it did. Not because anyone’s been deceived, but because the decisions were made in the right order.
Why we built Bloq Fronts
This is essentially the approach we’ve been recommending to bespoke clients for years. We’d specify IKEA carcasses to protect budget, then make the fronts ourselves to the standard we wanted. At some point it made sense to offer that directly. To anyone, anywhere in the UK, with or without a full design project behind it. You send us your IKEA kitchen plan. We produce drawings, give you a no-obligation quote, and once everything’s agreed we get to work in our South London workshop. Fronts are typically ready within 6-8 weeks and delivered to your door, ready to fit. It’s supply only, which keeps things simple. And it means you can have a kitchen that looks like it was made for you — because it was.
Explore the Bloq Fronts collections or send us your kitchen plan to get started.