How to Hide Your Refrigerator
So you're planning a kitchen design and everything is looking sleek, cohesive, and stylish. Except for the one behemoth of an appliance that takes up more room that nearly any other single object in the space: your refrigerator. Whether you're creating a contemporary kitchen design and your oversized 'fridge ruins your clean lines, or you prefer an old world-Tuscan look and a stainless steel fridge box out like a sore thumb, sometimes, you just need to hide your refrigerator within your kitchen design.
How to Hide Your Refrigerator
The method.
There are plenty of creative DIY tutorials out there that propagate camouflaging your kitchen with washi tape designs and removable wallpaper. But if you're looking for a permanent, beautiful solution, there's truly only one way to go. Hide your refrigerator behind cabinet panels that match the rest of your kitchen, and are made by the same company. You'll find that most custom cabinet sellers and manufacturers offer the option to create a cabinet panel for your refrigerator, and that plenty of refrigerators are designed to have custom-cabinet panels installed over them.
The process.
For the most seamless design and the easiest process, the decision to hide the fridge is one that's best made in the early stages of your design process. You'll also get the best results by working with a professional custom kitchen designer, since this isn't one-size fits all project, and your refrigerator cabinet will likely need to be tailored to the size of both the appliance you need as well as the size and layout of your kitchen.
Special considerations.
It sounds like a design industry joke, but standard refrigerators and standard kitchen cabinets are different depths. This means, in a typical kitchen, the refrigerator sticks out beyond the cabinet fronts. To solve this problem with custom cabinets, your kitchen designer will likely present you with a few options for your new refrigerator. The first is to purchase a special cabinet-depth refrigerator. Though you'll get similar cubic footage to a regular refrigerator, cabinet-depth versions are much more expensive. The other options involve tailoring the surrounding spaces to a standard size refrigerator. Recessing the refrigerator into the wall is often the easiest solution, but others include building out the cabinets that lie on the same wall as the refrigerator so they're the same depth, or positioning the refrigerator on its own wall and build it into a larger cabinet unit.
The final result will be a seamless, beautiful kitchen design.