Santa Barbara Home and Garden Show

The Santa Barbara Home and Garden show is just around the corner.  Rubottom Cabinets will, of course, be there. The show runs from February 27th - 28th at the Earl Warren Showgrounds in Santa Barbara.  Please come out to the show, we'd love to see you and discuss your project.  We will have our designers on hand, and, if it's not too busy, we'll discuss your project and possibly do some drawing on the computer.  Bring your measurements on a sheet of paper -- the more details the better, and cutouts from magazines or from our website with kitchen design ideas and questions.

The W.L. Rubottom Cabinets Display

We are planning on showing a complete kitchen with appliances.  We are developing it now.  Our goal is to show an elegant, custom kitchen design.  The design we're working on is full size and demonstrates the advantages of having truly custom kitchen cabinets produced by a local and modern cabinet maker.  In the interest of explaining our design thoughts for this show and to demonstrate how we put a custom kitchen project together from inception to drawing to manufacturing, I've scanned in the drawings below.  Click here to check out our working drawings.

Turning Drawings into Cabinets

Every kitchen cabinet we produce we draw first.  Although we make cabinets at a large scale and are therefore cost effective, we truly produce each cabinet as a custom entity for our customer's kitchens, bathrooms, dining and living rooms.  We design it first to make sure it all comes together ok and then produce it in our facility.

The above drawing has been hand drawn.  We've been producing our kitchen cabinet designs this way for the duration of our 60 plus years of operation.  We also produce modern CAD (computer-aided-design) drawings.  All of our production whether it starts like this as a paper/pencil drawing, or as a CAD drawing, will be broken down in the computer for 100% accuracy.  However, we often will turn to the traditional pencil and paper drawing because it combines accuracy with creativity to produce an elegant design.

Design Challenge

Our design challenge for the display at the SB Home and Garden show was to design a realistic full size kitchen with traditional and modern touches that was at a price point that would work for a Santa Barbara home owner.  Remodeling a kitchen in Santa Barbara can be very very expensive.  Let's face it: we love Santa Barbara, but it can be an expensive place to live.  Rubottom Cabinets has been making custom cabinets in Ventura since the early 1960s.  We produce and finish our cabinets here in Ventura and we install them all over the Southern California area.  We also have a network of trusted and cost effective kitchen trades that we work with from countertops to appliances to plumbers and electricians.

Maple Cabinets

We chose to use maple for our display cabinets.  We really like the way maple finishes and its durability.  Right now the price on maple is as low as it has been in years, so if you're considering maple cabinets, it is a great time to get them.  We use only domestic and sustainably harvested maple materials.

Interior Cabinet Materials

We have a mix of interior cabinet finishes.  Because of our modern manufacturing capabilities, this is something we can do for a custom kitchen remodel or new house.  In the display we have some finished interior cabinets with glass front doors, and so the interior is made of a finish grade maple ply.  We also have wood grain melamine interiors.  Melamine is a great product for cabinet interiors due to its strength and durability and it comes in a great variety of finishes and colors -- from pure white to wood grain.

Finishes

We are still deciding on the finishes, but it looks like the island will be in a Merlot finish and the rest of the kitchen will be in our Hickory finish with a brown glaze.

Door Style

The door we've chosen for the display is the Coronado by CalDoor.  Most of the doors we use we make ourselves, however we use CalDoor for our solid panel and other speciality doors.  They are the best in the business and we have partnered with them and are very happy with their product.

The Kitchen Layout and Design

As I wrote above, we wanted to show a 'real' kitchen.  Of course, a real kitchen includes appliances, cabinets, storage, trash, counters, etc.  It is the center of family life.  We are attempting, with this display, to build in these day to day necessities to show how Rubottom Cabinets can help to build your family life.  We've partnered with Reid's Appliances to supply us with appliances and Celestine Stone Tile, Inc. to supply counters.  The overall design aesthetic of these cabinets is what we are calling 'flush fit Euro'.  It is a modified flush fit look where the doors are flush with the ends and divisions, but since we are manufacturing these as frameless or Euro cabinets it is a more durable and less costly process than the traditional face frame flush fit application (which is also a type of cabinet we are capable of producing).

On this wall we have a standard cooktop, pantry, and built-in refrigerator layout.  We've also built-in a pantry with a Rev-A-Shelf swing out pantry and vertical dividers above for cookie sheet, cutting board, and muffin tins, etc. storage.  On the right of this wall we designed a working desk with storage drawers built into the upper cabinet.

A kitchen island should be a center point of the design but also highly functional.  We designed this island with all four sides in use.  The ends of our island has a bookshelf on one side

And a wine rack on the other.

The front of the island is filled with usable working and storage space.  We've included dovetail Rollout Shelves and sliding baskets for fruit or root vegetable storage.

The rear of the island will have shallow storage which can be used for dishes or linens.

And finally the peninsula will locate the sink, dishwasher, and a china cabinet upper.  The cabinet on the right is a diagonal upper cabinet at the corner between the peninsula and the refrigerator/cooktop wall.  See the final picture for an overhead view of the kitchen design.

Overhead View


 


 

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