Galaxy Indigo Easy Reach Base Cabinets

Navy, in any light you would choose to live with. On the swatch it is a muted slate blue, roughly #404754: grayed, dusky, some distance from a bright marine or royal navy and nowhere near black. Fabuwood describes it as a deep navy with violet undertones, and that phrase is fair as long as the weight falls on the noun. The violet is a cast, not a colour; it surfaces when the light falling on the paint is warm and there is not much of it, and it disappears again in daylight.

That matters more for Indigo than it would for a neutral. The paint is flat and opaque, with no grain to break up the surface, so whatever the light does to it happens evenly across the whole door. On a white shaker, a warm bulb makes the kitchen cosy. On a slate navy, the same bulb can pull the blue toward plum, or, if the corner is dim as well, toward a muddy near-black that reads almost like Pitch Black from across the room. Neither is a defect. Both are predictable, and both are fixable before the cabinets arrive.

Three things conspire at the corner. The diagonal door sits in the inside corner, the one place in the room that light from a single window cannot reach squarely. It sits under the meeting point of two wall cabinets, which is the deepest shadow on the counter, and any under-cabinet strip there tends to end short of the corner. And it faces into the room at 45°, so it catches window light at a different angle from every other door in the kitchen, often more glancing and more dim.

Put a warm, low light on a flat navy tucked into a corner and you have the conditions for both effects at once. So if the easy reach door looks right to you in the evening, the rest of the kitchen will too. It is the test case, and that makes it worth a little planning.

The table below is what to expect from Indigo, not a measurement; every room is different, and your own eye on a sample at home is the final word. It is ordered from the kindest light to the least kind.

Two consequences follow. First, choose the under-cabinet strip for the navy, not for the counter: 3000K is a good compromise when the uppers are a warm white like Dove or Linen, and 3500K suits a cool one like Frost. Second, make sure the strip actually reaches the corner. A continuous run that turns with the wall cabinets, or a short puck set over the diagonal, costs little at rough-in and a great deal afterwards. Our Fabuwood colour guide has more on how the Galaxy paints move with light.

The mistake with a navy sample is looking at it on the counter at midday. Test it where the problem is, when the problem is. The Galaxy Indigo door sample is $35.00 as displayed and final sale.

1. Tape the sample at 45° in the inside corner, at door height, below where the wall cabinets will hang.
2. Look at it after dark with only the lights you plan to keep. If the under-cabinet strip is not in yet, hold a bulb of the intended colour temperature above it.
3. Stand where you will see it from most: the sink, the table, the doorway. Judge it from there, not up close.
4. Hold a white card, or the white door sample for the uppers, beside it. Violet shows most clearly against a neutral white.
5. If it reads plum or black, change the bulb before you change the colour. Nine times in ten the light is the fix.

The cabinet itself is the same in every Galaxy paint: a square corner box that takes 33″ or 36″ along each wall, 34½″ high, with the front corner cut away for one factory-hung door (Fabuwood’s spec book notes Easy Reach cabinets do not get the soft-close mechanism) and fixed L-shaped shelves inside. The interior is a natural wood veneer, which helps here: open the navy door in a dim corner and the pale inside is easy to see into. The two sizes are $9.75 apart, so the walls decide, not the budget.

The listing also carries both as carcass-only loose parts, GIN ERB33-BO at $539.50 and GIN ERB36-BO at $546.00; confirm with your designer what they include. If the corner will hold cookware you use every day rather than bulk and bakeware, compare the rotating version on the same footprint, and for the full line in this finish see the Galaxy Indigo collection page.