I agree that what I see in Western New York state is that starter or lower cost homes/apartments have no hardware. Nicer homes do.

I need hardware.

Interesting. Thanks for the replies.

I checked pics from a friend's house this morning (facebook). She lives in a gated community with a 3500 square foot house and a 1000 square foot mother in law house. In ground pool, outdoor kitchen, natural stone tile throughout, 3 acre lot. House is about 10 years old. No hardware.

Checked another friend, house is 6 years old, nearly 4,000 sq feet. City lot in a subdivision built by a single developer. She upgraded everything in that house. No hardware.

I wonder if it started out as a cost saving measure in my area but just bloomed from there.

I do see that it saves the finish on the cabinets not to be grabbing them all the time. My husband sees it as looking "cheap" not to have it. I don't even see it.

Full overlay cabinets require hardware, or routed hand pulls, which is an expensive upgrade. Only partial overlay can be opened without hardware. Builders usually picked partial overlay for cost savings, and didn't usually install anything other than builder grade cabinets even in expensive developer homes, since most people couldn't tell the difference anyway. It's only in the last 10-15 years since the internet developed instant communication that they've been forced to up their game in the kitchen. You even see the occasional upscale tract builder offering inset, but it's usually just the site built hackers doing that. No builder offers one single thing above what he absolutely has to provide. Just think of the hundreds of $200 savings from not doing knobs. That pays for that extra vacation.

Not sure if it's location or price point, but it does startle me when I use a kitchen w/out knobs/pulls.
Like my sister-in-law's house in Virginia (average home in a nice neighborhood 30min from Vbeach):
--> how do you get to the spices when your hands are covered in ground beef?

Edited: or maybe another scenario: reaching for a spoon when your hands are dirty, or the trash, or the pan to fry the chicken....

W/ my kitchen, I can use a finger or knuckle or heck, even my toe to slide the drawer open.

And it's amazing how she doesn't notice the grime just from daily touching. I'm not saying she keeps a dirty house, no, just daily human oil on it over the years will do that.

Amanda

This post was edited by huango on Mon, Sep 15, 14 at 17:09

I have never lived anywhere that didn't have hardware. That seems really, really odd to me...didn't even know some never put in hardware. If I ever saw a kitchen without hardware I probably assumed they weren't done. Growing up we always lived in older homes and were on the low end of income brackets. Even the extremely basic military housing my DH and I started out in had hardware. Have lived in NE OH, Northern AL, Northern FL, VA, NC, SC, southern CA and now NE OH again.

I'm in the Midwest, & no hardware in my home and several in our neighborhood (homes about $300m and up). I recall there was an upcharge for hardware when we built our home. We figured we would add hardware on our own down the road...just never did.

I actually like the "bare" look and have no issues opening the cabinets. My DH really wants hardware in our upcoming remodel. I can take or leave the hardware. IMO, the kitchens do not look cheap without hardware. If anything, it's a simple, clean look.

I don't like the no-hardware look, either by design or cheaping out. It's like a face without eyebrows. In the past I've added them to doors with routed handpulls. My neighbors did a facelift on their kitchen, refinished all the cabinets. I told them it would all look great if they added hardware--any hardware!--and they looked at me like I was crazy.

how do you get to the spices when your hands are covered in ground beef?

I don't even like touching my hardware in that scenario, let alone the cabinet itself!

sj, haha, I know exactly what you mean. I'll grab a paper towel because my hands are too foul to touch hardware. Nevertheless, I still find little dried nuggets of foodstuff on the backs of pulls.

I lived with builder-grade, partial overlay cabinets with no hardware for about a dozen years, and was fine with it. We then added some contemporary pulls to freshen it up. While I like the look, a few of them bump into each other when open, and I've snagged clothing on the drawer pulls occasionally. The hardware reduces the total clear aisle width by a couple of inches. So I can see plusses and minuses.

I thought it was an 80s thing, but I guess not. My mom moved into an upscale duplex (S. CA) that had been "flipped" by the previous (temporary) owner. Mom may have actually chosen to forgo the knobs/pulls, but it drove me nuts. I can't tell you how many times I tried to open a cupboard from the hinge side, which is hard on the fingernails! When we chose the hardware for our new kitchen we were very much aware of the issue DIY2Much2Do mentioned: snagging clothing. We were careful to choose pulls with sleek ends that don't snag pockets on the way by and the knobs are all on uppers. Not this one, but this type:

I tend toward modern, so I prefer no handles from a clean aesthetic viewpoint. I also think they make more sense from a practical standpoint. If someone (ahem, DH) is opening cabinets with dirty hands, isn't it a lot easier to wipe the front and edge than the knob or pull? In my mind, knobs and pulls are dirt magnets that are hard to get fully clean.

In our kitchen a dozen years ago we had to decide, after looking at the very long list of one little cost after another after another, whether ninety pulls at three dollars a piece were worth it.

Since knobs and handles (in some situations) come very late in the remodel, they become an optional cost that can be sacrificed to help ameliorate the ridiculous total costs of the project.

Let's keep the emphasis on that word: ridiculous! The crap we thought was necessary...

We did not have hardware when we first moved into our new house. Getting the drawers open was a real pain. I tended to just leave them open a bit, rather than fight them. If we would've done routed edges, that would've helped, but of course, we didn't think about something like that until after we were done.

Yes, hardware costs. We have something like 45 drawers and doors in our medium sized kitchen. I saw some very fun/nice pulls that would've looked great in our log kitchen, but not at $5 - 10 each. We scrounged and found some on Amazon in bulk - I think about $2 each. I hope they last.

I thought it was a 1960s thing. Seems to me that is about when I started seeing it in homes and apartments (I was a child then, though, so I didn't get around that much!)

We built our house in 1994 in NC. I specifically wanted no hardware. We have partial overlay doors (although 20 years ago I couldn't have told you that) with routed hand pulls.

I don't care for visual clutter, and I like the simple, clean lines of no hardware. We have enough clutter anyway, without adding 30+ pieces of hardware to the mix.

This post was edited by aok27502 on Mon, Sep 15, 14 at 18:08

I didn't have hardware on my uppers in my last place. They were custom, full overlay with a routed spot on the bottom of the door.

When I was doing something that I knew would give me dirty hands I kept a piece of paper towel on the counter that I would open the cabinet with. It was no big deal. But I wear gloves at work and have to take them off to open any drawer or cabinet and replace them, so remembering to pick up a piece of paper towel is easy.

My former condo in Chicago, which was relatively upscale, was built in 1995 and had no cabinet hardware. Prior to that, all the homes/aparments I lived in did have it (built in 1940s and 1960s with original cabinets). Our current home in FL has hardware, even though the cabinets were kinda cheapies, and it's on the more upscale cabinets in the spec townhome we're buying, as well as all the cabinets in the adjacent units and the homes. I haven't lived in the midwest in a while, so not sure what's going on there since the 1990s, but I hated not having the hardware.

I have lived in the midwest all of my life, until this past August. Every home we have had has had hardware.