HGTV's Hilary Farr's Unconventional Kitchen Cabinets Are Both Stylish And Practical

HGTV star Hilary Farr is a master of blending classic and cutting-edge elements in her interior design creations. She's an authority on choosing kitchen backsplashes and countertops that best fit a room and harmonize with a design aesthetic. In every part of the home, she has intuitive and innovative takes on optimizing a space and making it both functional and chic. 

When it comes to kitchen cabinets, Farr has a very trendy — and certainly unconventional — trick up her sleeve that she has implemented in home reno projects. Instead of traditional cupboard doors that swing out, the celebrity designer takes a stylish, outside-the-box approach with doors that open vertically and are installed on hydraulic hinges. These cupboard doors defy the norm by lifting outward and upward. Lending a look that definitely has a sleek, urban vibe — and simultaneously invokes midcentury modern overtones — the vertical-lift cabinets have distinctive style. Beyond aesthetics, they are also extremely practical.

Their ease of use is one attractive feature — the doors glide open and shut silently, with soft-close features that prevent noisy banging or slammed fingers. The vertical lift system also keeps the doors from becoming obstructive as one loads or unloads a cabinet — they're high overhead and out of the way, as opposed to doors that swing open horizontally and remain at face level. In addition to eliminating the hazard of pinched fingers and hands, there's also little risk of hitting one's head on open cupboard doors since they have been lifted upward and toward the ceiling.

Lift-hinge cabinets further enhance accessibility to kitchen cupboards by eliminating certain framing elements. Many standard cabinets are framed, meaning they have wooden faces attached at their fronts that the hinges connect to. They are also often equipped with center stiles, or wooden pieces affixed at the middle of the frame that separate the cupboard into two halves. Both frames and stiles are obstructive when you're placing items in a cupboard and removing them, since they block part of the cupboard's opening.

With lift-hinge cabinet doors, in contrast, the entire opening of a cupboard is unobstructed. This makes placing and removing large items, like wide platters, much easier than when you're working with a standard cupboard. Accessing your cupboards and their contents virtually doesn't get any easier, unless you simply have no cupboard doors at all, and open shelving in a kitchen can be a major design mistake. But one even has the option of getting the best of both worlds, as hydraulic lift cabinet doors can be glass-faced for transparency — which is Food Network star Alex Guarnaschelli's go-to cabinet design choice.

In addition to being highly functional, some vertically opening cabinet models go further. Automation features are available for lift-hinge cabinets that let homeowners open the doors with just the touch of a finger. Doors equipped with motorized lift glide up automatically and remain open until the user is finished with their tasks. Some doors are equipped with a button inside the cabinet, and pushing the button causes the lift door to slide closed again. Still others have remote control activation or motion sensor technology for the easiest possible access.