Here are a couple of pics that show cabinets lining up horizontally and not lining up horizontally.

[Traditional Kitchen design[(https://www.houzz.com/photos/traditional-kitchen-ideas-phbr1-bp~t_709~s_2107) by Newark General Contractor Marty Galvanek

[Tropical Kitchen design[(https://www.houzz.com/photos/tropical-kitchen-ideas-phbr1-bp~t_709~s_2108) by Hawaii Kitchen And Bath Tervola Designs

It always looks better to have some horizontal alignment.

All of our top drawers line up but a few of our lower drawers do not (3 vs. 4 stacks).

It all depends on your priorities of form vs function. I'm uber-anal when it comes to esthetics, so for MY kitchen, if it's on the same wall 20 feet away, it's gonna line up. In fact, in my WHOLE kitchen, bases have either full height doors or 3 drawers all the same 3 heights: 6", 10.5", 14" (except where the drawer MW and double warming drawers mess up my grand scheme).

I have a couple of spots where drawers don't line up. Mine are hidden behind the island though so not extremely visible. They don't bother me at all because most everything else lines up.

The drawers under the rangetop don't line up with the stacks on either side. It's difficult to see from this angle, but the drawer under the MW drawer doesn't line up with the 4- drawer stack next to it or with lower drawer down the line on the other side of the prep sink.

I'm more about function and felt that since most horizontal lines were consistent, I didn't mind the few places where they were not.

In my world, yes. I made that very clear to the cabinet maker. I even have 2 faux fronts on dish drawers so they match up with other cabinets.

The only place they don't is in this picture...the double drawers on the right are freezer drawers and I couldn't make them match. This doesn't bother me. The 3 drawers next to it are actually a small drawer on top, and a pullout for appliances, both faux drawer fronts come out as one.

On the window wall run, you can see that the first set is indeed really 3 drawers, next: the top two are the dish drawer, real drawer below, same with set on other side of sink.

How we did the range wall:

Same thing on the island. One of those sets of drawers is the trash pullout, just made to look like multiple drawers..

Breezygirl,

Beautiful kitchen! Your kitchen looks like a very similar layout to mine. I have a range where you have the range top, the sink and window where yours are, the island and MW drawer almost where you do (my MW drawer is mid-island, island sink is at the near end from this vantage point). Mine is a Danish modern esthetic with slab drawer faces/doors in natural quartersawn walnut and 3 cm Caesarstone Nougat quartz counters.

I agree, there's no need to sacrifice greatly in function/layout for esthetics. Your kitchen looks beautiful despite not being completely rigid to the point of being a sickness (like me and Beekeeper's wife).

If my drawers didn't line up, I'd have to kill myself.
Or, I'd have to take them out until I could either figure out how to fix that, or replace them.

I just built a 16' 10" cabinet wall with different lines. However, they're geometric and mirror each other from end to end.

I admit, however, I'm incredibly OCD about symmetry.
There were some really pretty kitchens in this post!

It wouldnt even occur to me to have my drawers line up. I am pretty easy going though. The draw thing wouldnt even register on my radar. I was surprised to see so many people say yes. I was expecting everyone to say no.

It wouldnt even occur to me to have my drawers line up. I am pretty easy going though. The draw thing wouldnt even register on my radar. I was surprised to see so many people say yes. I was expecting everyone to say no.

I agree with Khallock- I have not given it much thought when planning our kitchen layout. I think you would want to go with function over form on this one, especially if you have taken the time to determine your storage needs. I am going out on a limb here and some might disagree strongly, but when everything isn't exactly symmetrical it looks more like furniture which can be aesthetically pleasing to the eye, if you like that sort of evolved over time look. That's my two cents, I'm relatively new to GW. In the midst of a new build...overwhelmed by so many decisions and slightly obsessed as well.

Design isn't Dada or fingerpainting. You can't do things randomly and just expect them to look good. In bee's kitchen, her obsession with alignment creates horizontal elements that add clean modernity to her transitional look. In my kitchen, I actually am going back into my plan to add some odd sizes to make the cabinets look more vintage. Still, I think keeping the top drawer the same size in most places is generally a good thing. Varying sizes is OK if you step back and assess how the whole thing looks. And avoid drawers that are very close in size but just a bit off, right next to each other.

Why would having drawers that don't line up offer more function?

Mine line up and are very much designed with function first.

Just wondering.

It seems like a teensy design point, but when they don't line up it makes the cabinetmaker look like a poor craftsman.

If they don't align, can you make them symmetrical, with two matched stacks on either side of the one that doesn't align?

And make the differences between heights balanced - even multiples of the smallest height, or all with the same "X" inches added instead of erratic heights.

Since I do not want a modern look, but like Marcolo, a more vintage look, I am thinking it may be more functional to mix this up a bit. It is really the 16 ft. wall that is giving me the problem. (The pix is below.) I really would like to drop the counter down a couple of inches for baking, but how do I do that and keep the top drawers lined up? Maybe I should forget that idea. Some deep drawers are nice, but I am thinking a few more shallow drawers would be more efficient. I can't get the math to work. Help me!

Interestingly, I would have said that drawers that didn't line up would bother me immensely. And then Breezy posted her kitchen, which is one of my favorites and one I continue to go back to for inspiration, and I realized that I have never, ever noticed that some of her drawers didn't line up. So I suspect, at least for me, I could classify this under the heading of overthinking a detail.

When I was planning my kitchen, I mapped out where everything would be stored and designed the drawers around what would go into them. They aren't the same size and they don't line up. I wanted a clean, casual look. The drawers are not very visible behind the island, and I kept them very plain so that they'd not look too busy.

Bee- I didn't mean that yours didn't provide function over form, but quiltgirl said after going over her items that she needed some deeper drawers and some shallower ones. Your kitchen is absolutely stunning! I wish my kitchen was going to be as beautiful as yours! You went to great lengths to provide for your functional needs while also keeping the clean lines of the kitchen drawers.

Did anyone else notice that in the photos that quiltgirl posted of the mismatched top drawers those with the polished nickel pulls seemed less obviously mismatched and non-symmetrical (if that's even a word) than those with the ORB cup pulls and knobs? Same with Breezygirls.

I think breezy's look great! People will argue strict design and strict functionality, but I find that the non-matching lines are much less sterile looking than those that are all on a perfect horizontal. I don't know yet how mine will end up, but I'll be fine either way.

Nice drawing, Quiltgirl! The level of detail in your drawing tells me you're probably pretty anal yourself. :) That looks just fine esthetically, but how much benefit would a 2" lower counter have? Even with 6" high top drawers, the usable depth of the drawer box is about 3.5", so 4" high drawers would really only hold really flat items in their 1.5-2" of depth (they call them pencil drawers for a reason). Also, varying the counter height gives you more crevices stuff can get stuck in, as over time expansion and contraction will cause the caulking/grout to separate. Are you so petite that 36" high counters are too high to work comfortably? If so, consider making ALL the counters 2" lower. Hey, it's your kitchen!

Beekeeperswife questioned the advantage of varying the top drawer depth. In our kitchen, the top drawers get used about 2-5 times as often as the 2nd row due to their accessibility, so if you want easy access to larger, frequently used items, deeper top row drawers are your answer. But this is where my analness wins out: sorry, large items, if you wanted to be in the top drawer, you should have been smaller. Haha!

CJ47, preplanning item storage is a VERY sensible way to do kitchen design, guided by functionality (prep areas, cooking centers, baking centers, dining areas). Unfortunately, my wife wanted very little involvement in the kitchen design despite being the sole chef (other than "Why isn't it done yet? What's taking so long?"). Also, you know what they say about the best laid plans... you painstakingly plan, you build, then you find out how to do it better in the next kitchen! Too, your usage patterns change over time (more kids, kids move out, more entertaining, less entertaining, more hoarding, less hoarding)... but so will your esthetic sensibilities. So it's probably best not to overthink it. :) I'm going nuts now trying to figure out the drawer organization without my wife's input. She doesn't want to tell me what she wants, but you can bet she'll complain about it when it's not perfect! Haha

Incidentally, a lot of you anal posters out there have made me feel a lot more normal. My wife makes me feel like I'm some sort of freak. Thanks, guys!

Why would having drawers that don't line up offer more function?

In my kitchen, 4-drawer stacks were necessary. I did not want to be chasing down the citrus reamers at the bottom of a deeper drawer in a 3-drawer stack. The function of the 4s beat the 3s in most places. So that automatically made my drawers misaligned. How on earth do you store this stuff in a deep drawer without loosing half of it and having to dig every time you need something? No thanks.

And in this pic:

For the perimeter drawers under the rangetop, neither option works: 1. making the top drawer under the rangetop shallower to line up to the drawer next to it nor 2. making the bottom drawer shallower to line up to the drawer next to it. These two drawers store my cookware. Lots of cookware. Lots. Lots of heavy, commercial cookware. Having one shallow and one extremely deep drawer would not work at all to store my cookware so function trumped lining up.

For the island run, the MW drawer meant one deep drawer underneath. I did not want to line up the stack next to it because I would have killed myself trying to use a very, very deep narrow drawer like that which would have resulted. Again, I store lots of smaller tools in that narrow 4-stack.

Then down the line on the other side of the prep sink cab, I needed a 3-stack in my prep zone to store my everyday prep tools like measuring cups, spoons, one of my microplanes, etc.

(Caveat: This drawer is only partially full as I haven't unloaded the DW yet this morning and because I need DH to install my new drawer dividers from Lee Valley so I can store even more things.)

And I needed deep drawers to store my large and small prep bowls.

(Again--the following two drawers are not full as I haven't emptied the DW and I still have bowls, etc waiting in the sink to go in DW)

So, to me, my drawer choices were ALL about function. I didn't think I was committing a faux pas until I read this yesterday. The room is uber functional for me so I could care less.

Wi-sailorgirl--That fact that anyone finds my kitchen inspirational is amazing to me. Thank you. ((said shyly with embarassed face...))

OOPS! Just noticed how the drawers look kinda messy, but I took these on the fly and didn't take the time to pretty them up for the camera!

Break it up with some full height doors. Maybe with pantry pullouts, or a mixer lift. Or just a roll out tray or two for those odd sized items that don't fit into a drawer.

We kept our top drawers all the same size on a run but allowed lower drawers to vary. The drawers were designed to fit what we had to store.

In this set, there is symmetry though that wasn't a goal - what we needed just worked out that way. One thing we did was to center the pull in the top drawers and then put it the same distance as that from the top of the drawer on the lower drawers. Because of that, even though the third drawers are different heights, the handles align because the tops of the drawers are all the same level.

The deep drawers are 5 piece and have the handle on the top rail.

Here is the other drawer set:

Breezy ... just wait until you see my kitchen (in a few months, nothing's happened yet). You're going to recognize some elements. Hope you don't mind!

I would go for balance first over a rule that says they all have to line up. Of course to me it depends upon what size "stuff" you are going to put in your drawers. I would start with function, including where things need to be in the space, and then see if I can balance out a run of drawers. But I do agree with others that in a vintage kitchen, not having drawers match up is more pleasing to me.
Diane

I agree with Diane. I might feel differently with an uber modern kitchen, though.

Breezy, I love your kitchen and I think it is very pleasing to the eye! I was getting all anal about everything lining up, but honestly I am more drawn to a little mix. It is more interesting to the eye and fits more my old farmhouse. I am going with two four drawer units on this wall thanks to your post on the virtues of four drawers. There are no uppers on this wall so now have to figure out how to store all my little baking stuff like chips and vanilla etc. Thanks for showing your drawers!
Davidahn: I tend to be anal. I am going to join ANAL ANONYMOUS and fight this thing! I am 5' 2" so a shorter area for mixing is really comfortable to me. Maybe I will lower only one 30" cabinet. Will have to play with that.
Good luck on your design process. Your wife is lucky to
have you so interested! My husband could care less what I
do with the kitchen just so long as he has food on demand. Is she not all that into cooking?

I would keep the counter the same height and then break up the stacks for more smaller drawers like Breezy's four drawer stack with a split drawer on the top. Try keeping the middle one 1 skinny with 2 big on the bottom and then try the 4 drawers on either side so you actually have 5 drawers.
so height for middle would be 6, 12, 12
On either side: 6,6,6, 12
on the ends: 6, 12, 12
Those would line up and still give you lots of smaller/slimmer drawers.

Tricia, that would work except I need the four drawer units on each end. The left would be by my stove which is on the adjoining wall and hold wooden spoons, spatulas, fry pan and ebilskiver pans etc. The one on far right Will be near clean up sink and hold extra towels plus coffee, tea stuff for pot near it. The four drawer units function better here. Right now the design reads from left to right: 21" 4 drawer stack, 34" 3 drawer (2 shallow and one deep), 31" 2 drawer stack, 34" 3 drawer and 21" 4 drawer stack.

quirgirl, can you do this?

Bump out/deepen the cabinets in your baking center, so that the run that is lower also comes out further from the wall.

Add shallower drawers below, as you have drawn.

But also add a line of little drawers above the counter, topped by a shelf tucked just under the windowsill. Use them for little canisters of baking spices, kosher salt, dragees and whatnot, plus cookie cutters, muffin tin liners, etc. The deeper shallow drawers below the counter can hold cookie sheets, silpats and so on.

Quiltgirl, my wife is PLENTY into cooking (she's an amazing cook and pastry chef). She's also ALL ABOUT complaining when she doesn't like how it turns out despite refusing to participate in the planning. :) I have noticed there's always one in a couple who's into design more than the other, and as you can see, it's not always the cook. :)

Marcolo that is a neat idea! My cabinets now are figured at 27" deep giving me a countertop of 28.5" and cannot go any deeper due to island. That is a counter to ceiling open shelf unit to the right of my baking area and I was thinking of scouting the antique stores for a set of depression glass containers to use for sundry baking items. I plan on leaving flour, sugar and stuff like that on counter in large glass jars. One of my upper deep drawers will fit the canisters if I feel a need to get them off the counter.

@Kitchendetective, amen to that. Our "uber modern" esthetic demands minimalist lines. In fact, we went with finger pulls that slip over the top of the drawer face rather than drilling into the front, and has no lip that hangs over. The overall effect is stunning as far as minimalism goes. We also avoided 4-drawer stacks for the same reason, too many lines.

Davidahn, I am sure your wife will be eternally grateful once she sees how efficient your newly designed kitchen works. You will get plenty of help on this forum. There are some really good participants with helpful suggestions. I am so grateful for the input, knowledge and graciousness of the people here. Read the post by Buehl about general guidelines of kitchen design too. Post you layout and we will throw in our two cents worth! And go to Houzz.com to get really inspired!

Well, my focus wasn't entirely on storage. I'm trying to make your shallow drawers below the counter make visual sense.

My don't line up but totally on purpose. If there is anyplace where form follows function is an absolute, it's in the kitchen. Like Breezy, I needed shallower drawers for those little things that would be lost in the larger drawers and I did not have the luxury of space. I decided that the best solution would be to try to create a different looking "cooking center" area by putting the four-drawer cabinet under the cooktop. It's extremely functional and personally I like the way it looks. I generally like to line things up but I was happy to break up the long horizontal lines!

My drawers do not line up all the way around the 4 sides of my kitchen, but do line up when you are looking at any one section at a time. I have 2 stacks together that are 6-12-12 and on the other side of the kitchen 2 stacks that are 6-6-9-9. What helps is that my stacks are caddy-cornered across the kitchen with appliances and base cabinets with doors separating them ... it would be very hard to look in any direction where you could see the "mis-matches" at one time.

My one advice ... find out the interior depth of your drawers ahead of time. My cabinets are frameless. On the 6-12-12 stacks, the useable interior drawer height is 4, 10.5, 9.5 (top to bottom on stack).

Where this becomes an issue ... I wanted to store all of my pans, pots, etc vertical on their edges in the drawers. The middle 10.5" drawers are tall enough for all of the casserole dishes and pie tins, the roasting pan, and almost all of the pans, pots, and lids to stand on edge (the 9.5" drawers are not tall enough for a few of those items to stand on edge). Both depth drawers are definitely deep enough for all of the big pots (even the 8qt stockpot) that I own except the huge "canning" pot.

Obviously, neither are tall enough for my 12" pans/skillets to stand on edge (arrggh!). I have really been struggling with how to store these. Right now I have them flat in the bottom of the 9.5" deep bottom drawer. Big waste of real estate !! I wish I had a shallower drawer I could put the big skillets in, or either had made my drawers similar to David's at 6-9-15 which would have given me 4, 7.5, 12.5 useable. My tallest 8qt pots are 7" tall, so all of them could have gone in the middle drawer and everything on edge could have gone in the bottom drawer (including the 12" skillets!).

On the other side of the kitchen with the 6-6-9-9 stacks, the useable interior drawer height is 4, 4.75, 6.75, 7 (top to bottom). I use the top 2 drawers for silverware, spatulas and all the other kitchen gadgets, foil wax paper cling wrap and plastic baggies, in-drawer knife block, potholders, dish towels, etc. All of those things fit with no problem in these drawers including the ladle. The 3rd drawer holds all of the tupperware and is the perfect height for this. The bottom drawer is where we currently keep the paper and plastic grocery bags until we carry them for recycling.

I hope you don't mind these photos, which are my MBR, not my kitchen. But if you look at how the cabinets work togeher, you'll see their irregularity is regular, which works for my eye. The top cabinets will have doors when I can afford hinges. The center, doorless cabinets will actually have tambour doors, which I've made but not installed.

This is panning across the entire wall, right to left.

I don't know if it's "vintage" modern or whatever. It was meant to mimic a Tansu with its combination of lines (and later) finishes.

Function goes without saying. Those are the last 12" cabinets I'll ever own. Completely stupid.

I admit to be AR.
I stand proudly in my lined-up, symmetrical mess.

What I don't get is what's wrong with never leaving the house? If I didn't have to work, buy cat/dog food and litter, espresso and Reese's cups (or brownies) I'd never leave the house, either. But unfortunately, they won't deliver so little.

Do what pleases your eye. That, in all these long, drawn out discussions, is what everything pretty much boils down to being. Because if YOu don't like it, why should you live with it? If you DO like it? Why should you live without it?

lol, Christine.

But there's a difference between never leaving your house, happily surrounded with Reese's PB cups, litter and pet food, and trying to leave but being stuck in a do-loop, going out, returning to check, going out, returning to check ... that sort of thing ! If you walk into your kitchen every single day, tilt your head to the side and think 'drat, those drawers look ridiculous', then you should do what you can in advance to minimize this. If instead you walk in and think 'drawers, are there really drawers in here?" (me), you can probably safely move on! But these would be later-reactions, and not heat-of-the-moment "what is wrong with these workers" rxns.

Case in point: I bought beautiful ceramic doorknobs from Australia 18 years ago when we moved into our wreck of a house. And it turned out their specs are different from America's doors; the length of the catch-thingy is different. So I spent the next 15 years fighting with doorknobs; they fall out, they go clack on the ground, I have to re-screw and retighten them all of the time. I go to open a door and everything flies off -- it is such a pia I cannot tell you. When it turned out we were to redo this house I thought "YES, I can finally have doors that work. [you can see where this is going...]. Then the expletives deleted who rebuilt this house chewed the most ridiculous ragged horrible shredded wreck of holes into our beautiful cherry doors, ...in the wrong f-ing place. Perhaps you can tell: I care about this every single day, a lot, many, many times over. It is a canker of AR irritation.

This you should avoid ... daily mutterings are not good for one's health. But short-term exasperation is another matter. Only you can tell.

Christine, I am going to get up now in search of chocolate!

Jerzeegirl.....I LOVE your Corgi's!

@Quiltgirl, forget about function or esthetics, my wife will just be happy when the house is DONE! Thanks for the pointers. I did a ton of research and in fact posted my draft layout in September 2012 (http://ths.gardenweb.com/forums/load/kitchbath/msg0916324623138.html). I got a lot of helpful ideas and made MANY changes for the better. In particular, I changed my layout from a U (peninsula) + island to a double island layout thanks to Lisa_A. Anyway, it's been a LONG process, and after MASSIVE delays, it should pay off soon! (In fact, I'm going to post an update to my year-old layout help thread right now.) :)

@CEFreeman, wow, look at your completely UN-lined-up cabinets! You are NOTHING like the rest of us liners-uppers! You go, girl (assuming Aliris is correct and your name is Christine)!

@Aliris, Completely agreed that this is not a random sampling of kitchen consumers; the anal retentive find themselves drawn to this forum like moths to a lamp. Also agreed that you must avoid your particular pet peeves in order to avoid 20 years of aggravation, whether they be lined up drawers or knobs that fall off. Of course, we the anal could simply choose to not let that annoyance bother us, but if we could do that, we wouldn't be us, would we?

No, we wouldn't be. :) We could also just buy a new set of knobs crafted for the market of residence, but then where would be the fun of that? Think of all the lost allegorical power....

Davidahn, I tried to fight the all lining up horizontal thing, but just could not do it. After fudging the layout this way and that, I ended up with my horizontal lines in a nice neat row. I tried to stick an odd drawer bank in there, but experienced a rising panic as I did. I confess I am A.R. I wish I were not. It haunts me. I go into Dr's offices and straighten pictures on the wall. Ah, but what a peace one feels with order and symmetry!

@aliris: Haha! "Allegorical power..." love it! I don't know how often you find occasion to pull out your ill-fitting knobs allegory, but it is immensely illustrative.

@quiltgirl: Good for you. Don't fight it, just give in to the seductive allure of order. Haha! Even though all my drawers line up at 6", 10.5", and 14" high, I do have two 12" high warming drawers that mess up my grand evil scheme. I also have a microwave drawer that doesn't fit within the grid, but at least it leaves the lower drawer intact at 14" high.

People, I don't know if this forum is therapeutic or just feeds our illness. But since there's no known cure for OCPD/AR, why fight it? (Obsessive compulsive personality disorder is the clinical name for AR, as opposed to OCD which is often confused for OCPD but is completely different and crippling.) Rather than suffer trying to come to terms with disorder, let's just embrace our inner anal retentive and revel in the beauty of symmetry and order. Why are we letting society tell us we're sick? Maybe THEY'RE the abnormal ones?!? Anal retentives of the world unite! Let's come out of the closet! Anal Pride! Wait, that sounds wrong. We may need to come up with a better slogan. Let's not reserve that domain name just yet.

Don't you mean CDO ? In alphabetical order, as it should be.

"Let's not reserve that domain name just yet.". LOL !!