The Dreaded Inside Corner Problem, or, Thanks Josette

On most projects, the issue of how best to access the inside corner comes up. That four square feet of area is mediocre storage, awkward at best, but people can't bear to see it wasted.

This is no problem if there is an outside access to the space. Just face the door or drawer cabinet to the outside. But that isn't always possible.

Outside Access to Corner Cabinet

Solutions that don't work:

The classic solution is the Lazy Susan. Usually, as the diagram shows, the Lazy Susan is three feet in diameter and has two shelves that spin around. Seems like a good idea.

Classic Lazy Susan Corner Cabinet

Of course, you lose the corners. To recover the remainder, you sacrifice a 12” adjacent space, prime storage. With two tiers, you get about 1350 square inches of shelf area.

Rev-a-shelf and other companies such as Hafele make “blind corner” units that are designed to solve the problem of wasting the adjacent space to reclaim the corner. You can see these on the web under “blind corner” storage. This is like a little train. When you pull out the storage in the adjacent cabinet, the inside corner follows it out like a little trailer. These are clever, but expensive, and you are still talking about 2 levels of storage. The ones I've seen cost $700 to $1,000. 

Perhaps that money could be spent elsewhere to better account.

Solutions that do work:

There's no one right solution; usually other factors in the design will influence what you do at the inside corner.

A simple, classic and inexpensive solution is sometimes referred to as a blind corner cab. 

Blind Corner Cabinet

Basically it's just a door cabinet at the corner where the shelves extend into the inside corner. Not a terrible solution, but to get to that interior you are down on your knees reaching back in the dark.

A variation on this is a bi-fold door at the corner. It's a little easier to use than a single door.

Bi-fold Corner Door, Stu Schaffner photo

Counter intuitively, sometimes it is better to just abandon the inside corner, and maximize the use of the adjacent spaces with wide drawers. 

Wide Kitchen Drawers. Stu Schaffner photo

It looks wasteful, but you come out ahead because the drawers give you densely packed, easy to see and retrieve storage. And there are three or four layers of it instead of two. Instead of the lazy susan's 1300 square inches of shelf, you have more like 1600 square inches with four drawers there. An interesting point is that you don't have to build any added cabinets; you are just making the adjacent ones wider.

Here's a solution suggested by our customer Josette Silvers: a stack of wicker baskets that just sit on shelves. 

Corner Baskets

This is nice storage for foods like onions or garlic that like a little air, or for cloths or certain dishes, etc. The clever part is that on each shelf there is a second basket tucked into the inside corner.

This solution is so elegant and simple. It gets you some of the inside corner in a clever and economical way. It adds variety and visual interest, but is also practical.

It's pretty easy to come up with a solution that's complex and expensive. But one that solves a problem well in such a simple way is to me the essense of good design.

Thanks Josette.