Six decisions that decide how a kitchen ages.

Painted, stained and veneered cabinetry cost broadly similar money on day one. The difference arrives in year seven, when something gets knocked, and again in year twelve, when you want to change part of the room without redoing all of it.

Painted cabinetry is a pigmented catalyzed finish sprayed over a substrate — MDF for the panels, almost always, because a solid wood panel moves with the seasons and eventually telegraphs a hairline where the panel meets the rail. That hairline is the most common complaint about painted wood doors anywhere, and it is not a defect; it is a material behaving as material does. Paint is opaque, so it shows a knock the way a car door does. It is also the only one of the three a good finisher can repair on site: fill, sand, spray, blend the sheen. Very pale whites warm a shade over many years in strong south light.

Stain hides life. Grain and tone break up the surface, so a scuff on a stained white oak drawer front reads as wear rather than damage, and a touch-up marker with a tinted wax handles most of it in ten minutes. The trade-off is variation: two boards from two trees never take stain identically, and a stained kitchen will always show some range across a run. Veneer solves a different problem — a real wood face on a stable core gives wide slab doors that stay flat and grain that can be sequenced along an entire wall, which solid timber cannot do at that width. The catch is thickness. You cannot sand a veneer face on site, so deep damage means replacing the part rather than repairing it.

Under-cabinet lighting is the upgrade nobody regrets and the one most often installed backwards. Fixed at the back of the cabinet bottom it lights the backsplash beautifully and leaves your hands working in your own shadow. Fixed at the front edge, behind a small shadow rail, it lights the work surface — which was the point.

Use continuous LED tape in an aluminium channel with a frosted diffuser rather than pucks. Pucks scallop the counter into bright pools and dim gaps, and the scallops are permanent. The channel also sinks heat, which is most of what decides whether a strip still matches its neighbours in eight years. Everything should dim, and the dimmer has to be specified alongside the driver — mismatch them and the run flickers at the bottom of its range, which is precisely where you will want it in the evening.

Colour temperature is where good kitchens go wrong. Warm 2700K suits painted and stained cabinetry and makes wood look like wood. 3000K is safer where the counters are white quartz or pale marble and the cabinets are cool grey. 4000K belongs in a garage: it turns warm whites yellow and makes food look grey. More important than the number is that everything in the room shares it — a 3000K strip under a 2700K pendant reads instantly as a mistake, even to people who could not say what is wrong. Specify colour rendering as well: CRI 90 minimum, 95 where food is prepped, or a walnut door goes muddy and a red pepper goes brown.

The reveal is the gap: between one door and the next, around a drawer front, where cabinetry meets a wall. A few millimetres of nothing, and the clearest single difference between cabinetry made for a room and cabinetry ordered in fixed widths then packed out to fit.

Stock runs come in set increments, so whatever is left over at the wall becomes a filler strip — usually 40 to 90 mm of flat material beside the last door. Once you have seen one you will see it in every kitchen you walk into. Custom cabinetry does not remove the leftover; it distributes it. Widths are adjusted across the run and the end panel is scribed to the wall, so the joint follows the plaster instead of announcing that the plaster is not straight. The same logic applies at the ceiling: either carry the uppers up and scribe them, or stop them deliberately at a height that looks chosen, with a shelf or a light in the gap. What looks careless is a 200 mm dust shelf nobody decided on.

Then hold the reveal. Three millimetres, consistent everywhere, reads as machined; two is tighter and less forgiving of seasonal movement, and on inset doors that gap is essentially the whole job. Consistency matters far more than the number. Lines should also run through — the top of a dishwasher panel level with the drawer front beside it, door edges landing on the counter seam, end panels returning in the same thickness as the doors, the toe kick at one height around the room. And graduate a drawer stack: a shallow top drawer over two progressively deeper ones looks considered, while three equal drawers look like a filing cabinet. Cabinetry almost never disappoints on material. It disappoints when the lines do not line up.