Christopher Peacock Cabinetry
15 July 2010
“When Less is Not More”
Yesterday I told you about the accidental discovery of a Snaidero kitchen showroom in West Hollywood on the way to a press conference. Well, as my business partner Joe Dusel (the webmaster on this joint venture) and I were walking back to the car, he noticed the Christopher Peacock Cabinetry Showroom and said, “We’ve got to visit this one too. You’ll like them.” But in order to tell you how he knew that, I have to say a little about how cabinets are made.
The two basic styles of cabinetry are face framed and frameless. In a nutshell, the basic difference is how one goes about keeping the cabinets from racking. If you put four sides of a box together and do nothing more with it, it will rock back and forth. How much it rocks back and forth depends on how you attach the four corners of the box, but whether it does it a lot or a little, it will rock. A face frame is just that, a wooden frame that goes over the front of the cabinet, there to hide the raw ends of th
e plywood that is usually used to make a cabinet and to keep it from racking. Some people (that would be me!) put a back on the cabinet as well. A frameless cabinet has a solid back to keep it from racking, but nothing in the front of the cabinet. Either method, if it is employed with integrity, will do just fine.
Where I part company with those who use frameless cabinetry, though, is with many of those who use the European-style cabinetry method. First, there is a string of holes, front and back for hardware and shelf supports. Typically, people bring home the cabinets, arrange the shelves one time-quite frequently to industry standards!-and then no more. But not customizing the cabinetry to fit the needs of the end user saves money as do the many ways of standardizing and homogenizing and cutting every corner practical in order to save on production costs. The difficulty arises when people decide to go beyond the practical and begin cutting into the quality of the cabinets themselves. So, a full 3/4″ back becomes a 1/2″ back becomes a 1/4″ back, each reduction being sold on the basis of being “every bit as good.” Screws are replaced with nails and then staples.
Poorly made face frame cabinetry is no better. The original cabinetry in our tract home, which they actually installed in a brand-new home, is unbearably cheap. They used veneered particleboard throughout, and compromised on every possible detail, in order to line their own pockets. The raised panel doors are, in fact, cheap veneered imitations that are edged with finger pull molding (thereby avoiding the expense of knobs) and hung on cheap, self-closing hinges. The drawers are finished with simple butt joints and employ plastic slide glides (attached to the drawer box with staples!) that, even forty years later, can be purchased for less than a dollar.
So, that is the sort of “competition” that Christopher Peacock Cabinetry runs up against, but I really did not want to talk about that sort of cabinetry, so let’s handle this particular brand of “wretched souls” as Dante did in the Devine Comedy. “Let us not speak of them,” he said, “but do thou look and pass on.”
Joe and I both knew the moment we walked into that showroom that we were in the presence of something extraordinary. I don’t know how to say how we knew, other than to simply cite the experience of those who have spent a sizeable portion of their lives covered with sawdust, but we knew, without so much as opening a single door, that we were looking at absolutely first class no-corners-cut-at-all cabinetry.
One sign was the quartersawn oak that had been fumed, but others have used this material and not made cabinets as well. Another sign was the hardware because hardware as heavy as that is quite expensive, and who would put it on cheap cabinetry? Although some do. The molding used throughout was magnificent, but I’ve seen molding on lots and lots of cabinets that were not done with this sort of attention to details.
Naturally, the drawers were all dovetailed, but that is not as sure a sign of quality as people have been led to believe. I have seen factory-made dovetails cut into plywood drawer boxes, which actually weakens that particular drawer box! Those in the industry know that, of course, but so often, with cheaper quality products, perception counts for more than the reality, and what the public doesn’t know often comes back to bite them. Interestingly enough, though, Christopher Peacock Cabinetry not only cuts their dovetails into solid wood drawers, but they top the drawer sides with walnut, a wood traditionally used in this manner to reduce wear.
The doors were inset, but even European-style cabinetry often uses inset doors. One significant different, though, was that these doors all had butt hinges, and now we begin to see sure signs of a superior product because doors hung like this have to be carefully set to the opening. You cannot get by with a Blum hinge with its built-in tolerances and easy simply-turn-the-screw adjustments. You have to actually fit the door to the opening.
Another quality detail was the cock beading applied to the drawers and doors in many of the styles of cabinetry. (The picture we show to illustrate it is actually of a fine English antique.) A separate piece of wood was given what is called a bull nose edge and was then carefully fitted to the individual drawer and door openings. It’s the kind of hand detail that simply isn’t done anymore, and I just told you why. It’s a hand detail.
We had an extended conversation with Clive Lucas, and I promised him I would include his contact information:
Clive Lucas
Designer
Christopher Peacock Cabinetry
LA Showroom
400 N. Robertson Blvd.
West Hollywood CA, 90048
ph: 310.854.7222 | f: 310.854.3705
Clive told us that Christopher Peacock Cabinetry is a boutique manufacturer and designer of custom Classic and Traditional style cabinetry of the highest quality, all built here in the United States. The other thing that blew us away was the pricing. Because there are so many variables involved, I am always most reluctant to discuss pricing in these blogs, but we were flabbergasted when Clive gave us a “ballpark” figure for one of the kitchen displays. We just stood there looking at the many quality touches and running our own little adding machine in our heads for what we would have to charge for similar work.
Clive went on to say, “People have a misconception of how much we cost and assume we are unattainable. Sadly, this has led to an awful lot of inferior copies which were probably unnecessary when the real thing could well have been affordable. It’s always profitable to copy a style but never the quality, and I’m sure there are plenty of people who deal with the daily disappointment of their ‘Peacock clones.’”
Interestingly enough, when I did some Internet research for this blog, I came across several threads that discussed how to make Christopher Peacock Cabinetry clones. But, really, there aren’t any. You either make cabinetry to those standards, or you don’t. Any cabinetmaker actually worth a damn could walk into that showroom and in a few moments, without the benefit of a single note, come away with all he needed to go to his shop and make the same thing. But no one really does, and that just revolves around production costs, and an honest assessment of the competition. A cabinet that “looks like Christopher Peacock Cabinetry but is cheaper” was necessarily made cheaper, so it’s not the same thing at all. Sometimes less is less.
Joseph
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One Response to “Christopher Peacock Cabinetry”
July 15th, 2010 at 8:25 AM
Now aren’t you glad I dragged you into the showroom? Christopher Peacock certainly does make nice cabinets. Of course, I disagree with your idea that using 3/4″ material on the back of a cabinet is a good idea unless you are talking about an island.
Joe