Slab doors/cabinets Rift cut White Oak

[Chad]

We use real wood veneers on both the Barker Cabinets and City Cabinets lines. Barker Modern also offers textured synthetic laminates that look very close to real wood and are a great option for slab-style cabinetry.

Our current rift-sawn white oak uses what the mill refers to as a slip-matched veneer. Veneer terminology can get confusing because there are several different names and matching methods used throughout the industry.

Later this year, after our current inventory is used, we plan to transition to a more consistent random-plank-matched veneer.

The main challenge with real wood slab doors is natural variation. The veneer on each 4′ x 8′ sheet is typically sourced from the same tree or veneer flitch, but the next sheet may come from a different source. On a larger project, that can mean some doors are cut from one sheet and others from another, creating noticeable differences in grain and color.

This is much less noticeable on framed doors because the rails and stiles visually separate each center panel. On slab doors, however, you may have an entire wall of uninterrupted panels next to one another, so differences between sheets stand out much more.

That is one of the reasons we developed Barker Modern. The textured laminates are designed to mimic the look of natural random-matched veneers while providing much more consistent grain and color from door to door.

They are not real wood and are not individually grain-matched, but for large areas of slab cabinetry, the overall appearance is typically more uniform and visually consistent than natural veneer.

[Steve Troyer]

On the Barker Modern cabinet door what is the core of the door made of?

When will the Random Plank matched veneer be available in the White Oak rift cut veneer? Will it be priced the same as the current White Oak rift veneer cabinet?

[Chad]

Barker Modern cabinet doors use particleboard for the textured laminates and MDF for the solid colors.

We are slowly transitioning to the new white oak and expect it to be fully implemented by the end of this year. Pricing should remain similar. Technically, the new sheets are more expensive to produce because the veneers have to be shuffled to achieve the desired look, but we don’t expect pricing to increase significantly.

• This reply was modified 1 week, 3 days ago by  Chad.

[Steve Troyer]

I am looking at the Valley or the Evolve door on the Barker Modern line if that makes a difference on the core.

[Chad]

Valley and Evolve are both made with the PBC.

[Steve Troyer]

Thanks for response. Why is particle board, MDF, and plywood used in various doors? I believe Barker Cabinets uses plywood for doors and Barker Modern uses MDF and particle board for doors.

[Chad]

MDF and PBC are simply the core materials commonly used in Europe for textured laminate and solid laminate doors. Those products generally are not offered with a plywood core because of the way they are manufactured.

Textured laminates, in particular, benefit from a smoother, slightly more compressible core that allows the press plates to emboss the texture consistently into the face material. Plywood is not as well suited to that process.

Plywood is also much less commonly used for this type of product in Italy and Spain, so the European manufacturers typically build these panels around MDF or particleboard cores instead.