Galaxy Nickel Drawer Panel Cabinets

Every drawer in this line arrives with its face already on it: a ⅝-inch solid-wood dovetail box on Blum Tandem plus Blumotion runners, with the five-piece shaker front fitted at the factory. You do not order a front for a drawer you are also buying. An applied front is for the cases where there is no cabinet in the order to carry the face.

The common ones are all gaps rather than storage. A narrow strip between a drawer bank and an appliance, where a plain filler would look like a filler and a faced piece looks like part of the run. The return at the end of a peninsula where a drawer bank stops. A site-built structure — a bench, a plinth, a boxed-in duct — that has to read as cabinetry. And occasionally a genuine false front, where a sink or an appliance sits behind what looks like a drawer.

What it is not is a replacement front for a cabinet you already own from another line. Reveals, overlays and rail widths differ between manufacturers, and a face built for these boxes will not land correctly on somebody else’s. If that is the job, the parts you want are on the refacing panel page and the conversation starts with photographs.

One and a half inches and three inches are not drawer widths. They are strip widths. That matters, because a shopper arriving from a search for "drawer front" is usually picturing an 18 or 30-inch face, and neither of these is that. Read together with the third member of the same family — GN DWR6 at $201.50, which the store titles as a dishwasher panel and which lives on the dishwasher panel page — the DWR codes read as an ascending series of narrow finished faces, 1-1/2, 3 and 6 inches, sized for the gaps around appliances rather than for drawers.

We are not going to resolve that from a product title. The listing says drawer panel and the family behaves like an appliance-gap panel, and those two readings imply different parts arriving in the box. Tell us the opening and what is behind it, and we will confirm which part the code ships as before the order is released. That is a design question, not an extra charge.

An applied front is specified against an opening, not against a cabinet code, which is the opposite of how everything else in this catalogue is ordered. The SKU reading guide explains the cabinet convention; this part sits outside it. Three measurements do the work.

1. The finished opening, width and height, measured where the face will land — not the nominal gap on the plan. On an existing structure, measure at the top, middle and bottom, because the number you want is the smallest one.
2. The reveal you are matching. Look at the drawer tier beside the opening and measure the gap between fronts. The applied piece has to sit in the same rhythm or the eye catches it immediately, and a half-millimetre at eye level on a base run is more visible than people expect.
3. What is behind it, and how it will be fixed. A drawer box, an appliance door, a plywood carcass edge and a site-built frame all take a different fixing, and that decides whether the piece needs to be supplied oversize for trimming.

Send those three with a photograph of the opening. Anything that has to be trimmed on site should go out with GNK EDGE-BAND at $7.15 in the same box, because a cut edge on a narrow piece is proportionally far more visible than the same cut on a big panel — there is less face to look at and more edge.

The best use we see is the appliance gap in a drawer run. A dishwasher or a panel-front appliance set into a bank of drawers leaves a strip either side, and the eye reads that strip against the drawer fronts above and below it. A flat filler there breaks the rhythm; a faced strip in the same paint continues it. That is a three-inch decision that changes how the whole run photographs.

The second is a peninsula or island return. Where a drawer bank stops and the end of the run has to turn, a narrow applied face closes the corner in the same plane as the fronts. What you are choosing between there is this part, a filler, and a proper end panel, and the answer depends on how much of the end is seen — the decorative end panel page takes that decision on directly.

The third is the one nobody plans for: a change on site. A duct turns out to be where a cabinet was going, a structural post cannot move, a window sits two inches lower than the drawing. A narrow finished face is what turns that improvisation into something that looks intended, which is also the argument for having the elevation drawn properly first. Send it for a free 3D design and most of these surprises get found on paper.

These are made in the same run as the doors, on the same five-piece shaker construction — ¾-inch solid stiles and rails around a ⅜-inch recessed MDF centre — and they carry the same Fabuwood limited lifetime warranty as everything else on a KCMA-certified, AWI Premium Grade order. Lead time is the collection’s: seven days to three weeks, pre-assembled.

Order them with the cabinets. A face this small is exactly the sort of item that gets added later, and later means a different finishing batch — which on a narrow strip sitting directly between two doors is the worst possible place for a variance. On a mid-tone grey, two adjacent faces from different runs is a thing you will see every time you walk past, and there is no fixing it afterwards short of reordering.

The full parts list is on the decorative accessories page; the applied fronts themselves are here. If you want to check the paint against your floor before committing to anything at all, a door sample is the cheap first move, and the whole range is on the collection.