Galaxy Pistachio Green Appliance Garage Cabinets

The list has two. GPG WAG2418 is the standard appliance garage at $968.50, and GPG WDCAG2418 is the diagonal corner version at $757.25, $211.25 less. Both are titled as 24 inches wide. The 18 in the codes reads the way it does in the wall codes, where GPG W2418 is a 24-wide, 18-high wall cabinet; take that as the likely height and confirm it, because neither listing prints it.

For scale, that plain W2418 wall cabinet is $250.25. The garage costs roughly four times as much for a box of similar size, and the difference is its door and its mechanism: a garage door has to open without swinging out over a worktop full of things. What the door does — tambour, lift, or hinged — is not stated on the listing, and it is the most useful thing to ask about before choosing one. The garage list shows both codes.

There are three honest answers, and which one is right depends on how the garage meets the cabinets around it.

A garage sits in a stripe of light that no other cabinet gets: undercabinet lighting from above, the worktop reflecting up from below, often a window beside it. That is exactly the condition in which a greyed sage shifts most, and it is why this colour decision should be made with physical door samples rather than on a screen. Stand the green sample and the light sample side by side on the worktop sample, where the garage will be, at the time of day you use the kitchen most. Whichever one makes the garage look like it belongs to the wall, or to the counter, is your answer.

Our samples guide explains how to judge a finish in your own light, and the matching guide covers how counters and backsplashes pull a cabinet colour warmer or cooler.

Nobody publishes an interior height for a garage, and appliance heights vary more than people expect, so the only reliable inventory is the one you do at home with a tape measure. Measure each appliance you want to hide at its tallest point in use, not in storage: a kettle with its lid open, a coffee machine with its reservoir lifted out, a toaster with the lever up, a stand mixer with the head tilted back. That last one is why stand mixers rarely live in a garage.

Then ask us for the clear interior of the code you are considering and compare. A garage that holds the kettle, the toaster and the coffee machine and keeps them plugged in is the ideal; one that holds only two of three becomes a cupboard for the two you use less, and the third lives on the worktop anyway.

• The breakfast garage: kettle, toaster, and the pods or beans in a drawer below.
• The coffee garage: one machine and a grinder, beside a drinks drawer.
• The small-kit garage: blender and food processor bases, stored on a counter because they are used several times a week.

The garage’s whole point is that it closes. The mistake is running appliances inside it with the door down. A kettle, a coffee machine and a toaster all release heat and, in two cases, steam; boxed in, that moisture condenses on the inside of the cabinet and on the underside of the uppers above. Over years, repeated steam at the same spot is hard on any cabinet finish, painted or not.

The rule is simple: open the garage, pull the appliance forward to the front edge, use it, let it cool, push it back. A garage deep enough to let you work an appliance at the front of the box without taking it out is a better garage, which is one more reason to ask for its interior depth. The power socket inside the box needs planning with your electrician before the wall is closed, and so does the undercabinet lighting above it; the lighting list prices the fixtures.

A garage stands in front of the tile, and that raises a sequencing question the tiler and the cabinet installer need to agree on before either starts. Either the backsplash runs continuously behind the garage, which is simplest and means the garage can be removed later without a hole in the tile, or the tile stops at the garage sides, which saves a few square feet of tile and makes the garage permanent.

We would tile behind it. The saving is small, and tile behind the garage protects the wall from exactly the steam and splashes the garage exists to hide. It also means the inside of the garage, when the door is open, shows the same backsplash as the rest of the kitchen rather than bare plaster.

Colour enters here once more. A garage in the green stands against the tile as a solid block of colour at eye level, and the tile colour becomes its background. Creamy, warm whites flatter a greyed sage; a stark blue-white can make it look dull by comparison. If the tile is not chosen yet, choose it with the door sample in hand.

The corner version is the cheaper of the two, but the choice is made by the plan, not the price. A diagonal corner garage sits in the inside corner of an L or U, where the worktop is deepest and hardest to use for anything else; that corner is often the best garage position in the kitchen, because it keeps appliances off the straight runs where you actually prepare food. A standard garage sits on a straight run, usually at the end nearest the breakfast table or the drinks area.

If your layout has an inside corner and no corner wall cabinet planned above it, look at the corner garage first. If the uppers include a corner wall cabinet, check that its door and the garage door do not collide, because the two will be stacked in the same angle.