Materials & Finishes

Kitchen Materials and Finishes

Cabinet fronts, worktops, hardware and finishes for kitchens in Thailand: what each choice does in this climate and which ones you can change later.

Book a free consultation

Section 01

What a Kitchen Is Actually Made Of

Three decisions carry almost all of it. The fronts, which are most of what you see and most of what you touch. The worktop, which takes the heat, the water and the knives, and which is the hardest thing to change once it is in. The hardware, which is the smallest part of the budget and the first thing your hand lands on every morning. Everything else follows from those three. Get them right and the room works whatever style sits on top of it, and get them wrong and no amount of styling will cover it.

Highlights

Materials We Work With

Teak wood

a warm hardwood that deepens in colour as it is used, with natural oils that make it one of the more stable timbers in heat and humidity

Marble and quartz

natural stone chosen slab by slab, or engineered quartz that is non-porous, needs no sealing and stays the same from one end of the run to the other

Matt lacquer

a sprayed finish in any colour you like, flat and soft to the eye, and the only way to get a front that matches nothing else on the market

Brass hardware

solid pulls, knobs and hinges, lacquered to hold their colour or left bare to darken where your hands land

Section 03

What Heat, Humidity and Sea Air Do

The climate does something different to each of them, which is why one blanket answer never works. Timber moves as the air around it swings between humid days and air-conditioned evenings, so it has to be built with that movement allowed for. Stone does not move, but engineered quartz carries resin in it and resin reacts to long hours of hard sunlight. Metal reacts to salt, which is why a coastal property specifies hardware differently from one an hour inland. None of this rules anything out. It changes which version of each material you should be asking for.

Section 04

Which Choices You Can Change Later

Handles come off in an afternoon. If you are undecided, that is the decision to leave open, because swapping them later costs a fraction of anything else and changes the character of the room more than you would expect. The worktop is the opposite end of the scale: it is cut to your cabinetry, sealed against the wall and joined at the corners, so replacing it means taking apart the things around it. Fronts sit in between. Treat the worktop as the decision to spend time on and the handles as the one you are allowed to change your mind about.

Section 05

How Many Materials in One Kitchen

Three is usually the ceiling: something for the fronts, something for the worktop, something for the metal. A fourth starts to look like indecision rather than a scheme, unless it is doing a specific job, such as timber on an island in an otherwise painted room. It also helps to let one of the three lead. A kitchen where the stone is the point wants quiet fronts around it, and a kitchen built on a timber front wants a worktop that stays out of the way. Everything cannot be the interesting one.

Next step

Not sure which materials suit your home?

Tell us where the property is, how much direct sun the kitchen gets and whether anyone in the house cooks properly or reheats. Those three answers narrow the materials faster than a showroom visit does, and we will come back with a shortlist rather than a catalogue.