Galaxy Pistachio Green Specialty Base Cabinets

A wall cabinet does two jobs people rarely notice until it is gone: it stores things, and it houses things — the microwave, sometimes the spice rack, the cookery books. Take the uppers off a wall and hang shelves there instead, and the storage can move to drawers below. The housing cannot move onto a shelf. A countertop microwave then sits on the worktop you were trying to keep clear, which is exactly the clutter the open wall was meant to avoid.

A base bay puts the appliance into the lower run, under the counter, as one dark rectangle among the green fronts. Frost, Linen, Dove and Nickel buyers put microwaves low as well, but the reason is sharper with a colour. A green kitchen is often planned green below and light above, or green below and open above, and in both plans the wall is the one place the microwave cannot go. The bay is not an extra here. It is what makes the plan work.

Once the microwave is under the counter, it can go almost anywhere a base can, and that is a better menu than the wall ever offered. Four positions come up again and again:

In a kitchen with an island, the first position is usually the best. The island’s seating side is where the people who use a microwave most — children after school, someone reheating lunch, a guest making tea — already are, and it keeps them out of the lane between the sink and the range. The second is the natural choice in an L or a galley without an island. Whatever the position, the worktop above or beside the bay is part of the plan: a hot bowl needs somewhere to go the moment it leaves the appliance.

A bay on a perimeter run gets its outlet from the wall behind it, which is easy. A bay in an island does not have a wall behind it, so the circuit has to come up through the floor, and that has to be decided before the floor is finished. On a timber floor with a basement or crawlspace below, it is routine; on a concrete slab it means cutting a channel, which is far cheaper before new flooring goes down than after.

Read the microwave’s installation instructions before the electrician prices the job. Many manufacturers ask for a dedicated circuit, and the manual says where the receptacle must sit relative to the appliance. Local codes also have their own rules for island receptacles, so let the electrician set the details. What you control is the order: appliance chosen, manual read, circuit planned, then cabinets ordered. Reverse it and the cheapest fix left may be an extension cord, which is not a fix.

Kitchens that give up wall cabinets often give up a wall of tall cabinets too, and then the wall oven needs a new home. One answer is a single oven under a cooktop or under the counter beside it. The catalogue lists GPG BOC30 at $598.00 under base cabinets, titled a 30″ base oven cabinet — but the product is tagged as a base open cabinet, and those are two different things. Before an under-counter oven is planned around it, ask us to confirm what the box actually is and what cutout it provides, and check that against the oven manufacturer’s requirements for under-counter installation, which differ from wall installation.

If there is room for one tall cabinet, the oven cabinets keep the oven at a height that suits most cooks better than any under-counter position, and you may find one tall unit next to a run of green lowers and open shelves still reads as a kitchen with few wall cabinets. With the microwave in a bay and a proper hood over the range, the wall above the counter is then genuinely free for the open shelves that made you plan it this way.

Putting the microwave under the counter puts it within a child’s reach, and that cuts both ways. For school-age children it is a real convenience: they can heat their own snack without climbing on anything or lifting a hot bowl down from above their heads, which is the more dangerous direction. For toddlers, it is an appliance at eye level with a door that opens. Most microwaves have a child lock in the settings; use it for those years, and place the bay where small hands are least likely to be unsupervised — which is another argument for the island’s seating side over a spot tucked into the cook’s corner.

For adults with bad backs the low position is the harder one, since every use means bending. If that is someone in the house, a microwave in a wall cabinet or an open shelf at chest height may be better, even in a kitchen with few uppers.

Both cabinets are 24″ deep and 34½″ high, with the open bay above and storage below, in the same green as the rest of the lower run. GPG BMC24 is $614.25 and GPG BMC30 is $695.50, pre-assembled and shipped in seven days to three weeks. Carcass-only versions sit under loose parts at $396.50 and $448.50. Where a bay finishes a run — at the end of an island, typically — the microwave cabinet end skin, GPG SK MC, is $50.05 under decorative accessories; order it with the cabinet so the colour matches.

Three other unusual boxes live under the plain base cabinets listing rather than on this page: GPG FD18, an 18″ file drawer base at $559.00; GPG KD30, a 30″ knee drawer at $172.25; and GPG BSS3, a base with accessories fitted, at $2,021.50, whose listing states neither its width nor its contents — ask before it goes on a quote. For a corner, the blind corner, easy reach and lazy Susan pages cover each answer; for seating, the drawer bench seats.

Planning a kitchen with few uppers is mostly about deciding where each appliance and each category of storage goes once the wall is freed, and that is easier on a drawing. Send the room through a free design request — a designer replies within one business day and the 3D design and quote follow within 24 to 48 hours — and see the full finish on the collection page.