The official name for this place: blind cabinet corner. It’s found in both kitchens or bathrooms—anywhere with cabinets—but mostly in kitchens because that’s where you’ll find cabinets that meet at corners. Fortunately, there are a number of things you can do or accessories to add that make the blind cabinet corner a more liveable space.
3 Reasons Why Blind Corners Are Difficult
Kitchen cabinet corners, whether we’re talking about bases (lower) or walls (upper), are deep, dark, and inaccessible. It’s what happens when simple geometry meets up with most homes’ scarcity of space. The name is simple: it’s called a blind corner because, when reaching into it, you reach blindly:
Deep: Corners can be close to 50-percent deeper than cabinets on either side. For example, base cabinets tend to be 24 inches deep. But at corners, they are 34 inches deep.Dark: Light is normally scarce in corner wall cabinets and even worse in corner bases. Adding a light in your blind corner cabinet is a thoughtful design consideration for an otherwise dark space.Inaccessible: Reach is hard. If you’re not trying to reach straight into the corner (a long distance), you’re reaching into the sides, where you can’t see.
Blind corner pullouts are available from most major kitchen cabinet manufacturers at the time of installation. Alternatively, if you already have cabinets in place, companies like Rev-a-Shelf offer remodel solutions. Merillat put its collective cabinet-designing brainpower to the task with its two-tier lazy susan for bases. It does two things: first, it swings within the cabinet, then it pulls out of the cabinet for easy reach. This type works a bit better than the old-school kind because it’s essentially a big circle—bigger than the base cabinet itself. But it has a 90-degree slice cut out of it to make it fit into the cabinet corner. You can still couple these types of cabinets with a classic, round lazy susan to increase access. But one notable pitfall of these cabinets is that their doors are smaller than the interior space. You’re not buying yourself much more storage space this way. But it looks better than many other options. There will be some wasted space to the left and right of the angled drawers, dead zones built into the drawer to create 90-degree angles with the adjoining counters. But if you can live with those two triangles of hollow space, angled drawers help fill in an otherwise forgotten corner. Curved wall and base cabinets are a good, high-end solution to dark blind corners. Note, too, that it allows you to place your kitchen sink in that problem corner. Curved cabinets are still not common, so expect to pay substantially higher prices for them.
