Shaker Cabinets - An Antique Or a Modernist Kitchen Cabinetry?

Some Shaker cabinets are black. Some are deep. Some are clear, some are satin, some are plain and some are slightly tarnished.

In my kitchen, I see a Shaker cabinet in each of the kitchen windows. When I close the blinds and the kitchen becomes less blue. When I turn on the lights, there is a hint of blue. When I leave the room, the space is more gray than blue.

In one of the Allen W. Womack novels, "The Brother From Another Planet," a Shaker minister writes about the Shakers in Indiana. They moved there from France, he said, "in order to live with the harmony of the Earth and its inhabitants." He said they had every material need met by harvesting what they needed from nature and by growing everything they needed.

He wanted to bring Shakers, the people who lived in one-room cabins and gathered around cooking fires, out of their habitations in the woods. Why not bring them into a city? I think he was concerned that there might be too much traffic in a city that he saw as too green and full of industrialists.

When I was growing up, the Shaker cabinets were so plain that they looked like black kitchen cabinet. The colors did not match.

My father did not want to stain a black cabinet. So, when I moved into the house where I grew up, I bought a black cabinet. A black cabinet with a white sink. And a white-painted cabinet with a matching sink.

Later, I made an effort to add a little "Shaker" to the black kitchen cabinet. As an homage to my mother, the Shaker style was again very important.

In a sense, a black cabinet is really a closet. It fits into that second thought of the cabinet. It fits well into that second place.

Shaker black cabinets are very hard to buy. Black cabinets are expensive. Most Shaker cabinetmakers give the blue-and-gray colors on their websites.

People also like to go online and look at Baltimore cabinets that are very pretty and show up very nicely. There are Shaker cabinets that have been pressed into gorgeous shapes.

It can be a matter of taste whether you go to the internet or to a real showroom to buy your black kitchen cabinet. The internet is a good place to start, and sometimes you can get there for much less than you would if you went to a real dealer.

The value of a black cabinet cannot be measured. When you consider the high cost of new homes, a black cabinet is a bargain. We buy them for use in an antique-style Shaker kitchen.