Metabox: The no-drawer drawer

Another product that gives a custom result at less cost is the Metabox Drawer System, made by Blum, one of the largest German manufacturers of cabinet gear.

Usually when you make a drawer, you build a wooden box, the drawer box, often with dovetail corners. Then you finish it. Then you mount costly hardware on it, and attach a finish front on it in the wood of choice. Very nice, classic, elegant. But there are so many steps in the manufacturing process; its intrinsically expensive.

The usual kitchen design solution to this conundrum is to minimize the number of drawers, and put in a lot of door-front cabinets. The problem with this is, door cabinets hold about half what a bank of drawers can, and what's in there is tough to extract.

With Metabox, the hardware is the drawer sides and the drawer structure. You don't build a box at all. You mount half the hardware on the cabinet, the other half to a 3/4” plywood drawer bottom (which you have already varnished), then the drawer is literally ready to hang in the cabinet. Then you attach the drawer back, and the finish drawer front, with cute little adjustable clips.

If you built a metabox drawer, with a plywood or maybe Valchromat front, you would have a full extension drawer with all the practical virtues of a conventional drawer, but at a much lower cost.