The first time I called Alexei Ceban to talk about kitchen design, I assumed we’d spend the hour on door styles and paint colors. He spent the first ten minutes asking me how I cook.
Do I bake? Do two people end up in the kitchen at once? Where does the trash actually go? I gave him vague answers, because I’d never really thought about it. That, he says, is the whole problem.
“Most people pick a look first and try to live inside it later,” he told me. “Then they wonder why the kitchen fights them every day.”
Ceban runs Loon Cabinetry, a small shop in the Twin Cities that builds kitchen cabinets minneapolis one room at a time. He’s measured a lot of kitchens by now, in century-old houses near the lakes and in newer builds out past Maple Grove, and he keeps walking into the same mistake. The kitchen was designed to fit the cabinets. It should be the other way around.
The shelf makes the decision for you
Stock cabinets come in set widths, usually jumping in three-inch steps. Your wall almost never lands on one of those numbers. So a 35-inch gap becomes a 33-inch cabinet plus a strip of filler, and you’ve just paid for two inches of wood that does nothing but cover a hole.
“People think filler is normal because they’ve only ever seen it,” Ceban said. “A corner where you can’t reach the back, a cabinet that’s two inches off the wall, a gap by the fridge. None of that has to exist. It exists because somebody bought a box and made the room apologize for it.”
When the boxes are built to the room instead, the odd wall width or the tall old ceiling stops being a dead spot and becomes part of the plan. That’s the part you can’t shop for off a shelf.
Start with the verbs
The questions Ceban asks before he draws anything are not about style. They’re about what you do.
A serious baker needs a spot for sheet pans on edge and a slab of counter that nothing else competes for. A household where two people cook at the same time needs a path through the middle that doesn’t turn into a traffic jam at the oven. Someone with a morning coffee routine wants that whole operation in one place, mugs above, machine below, instead of crossing the room three times before they’re awake.
“I’d rather know you make stock in a giant pot every Sunday than know your favorite color,” he said. “The pot tells me where the deep drawer goes and how wide it has to be. The color we figure out later, and it’s the easy part.”
The old “work triangle” between sink, stove, and fridge still gets quoted in design articles, but Ceban thinks in zones instead. Prep, cook, clean, store. Where each one lives depends on the person, not on a diagram from a textbook.
Drawers beat doors more often than people expect
One of his standard arguments is for drawers in the base cabinets, even for pots and pans. A door means bending down and reaching into a dark box, then shoving things to the back where they disappear for a year. A deep drawer brings everything to you.
“Nobody ever asks for fewer drawers after they’ve lived with them,” he said, and laughed. “It’s the one upgrade where I’ve never had a single person call to complain.”
The Minnesota houses earn their keep
A lot of the homes he works in are old, and old houses are rarely square. Floors slope, walls bow, ceilings run higher than any catalog cabinet was built for. Stock cabinetry treats those as problems to hide. Built-to-fit cabinetry treats them as the actual shape of the room.
He also makes a practical point about materials that matters in this climate. The boxes he builds use furniture-grade plywood rather than the particle board common in stock lines, partly because it handles Minnesota’s swing between dry winter heat and humid summers without swelling and sagging. A cabinet that fits perfectly in March is no good if the box gives up by August.
The mistake he sees most
The thing that frustrates him isn’t bad taste. It’s people designing for an imaginary buyer instead of themselves.
“Everybody’s worried about resale and what looks good in a photo,” he said. “You’re going to stand in this kitchen every single day. Build it for the way you actually live, and it’ll photograph fine anyway. Build it for the photo, and you’ll resent it by Thanksgiving.”
When I asked what a good first step looks like for someone who’s overwhelmed, his answer was almost boring in how simple it was. Spend a week paying attention to your own kitchen. Notice where you set the groceries down, where the mess piles up, what you reach for and can never find. Bring that to whoever designs your cabinets.
The list of habits, he says, is worth more than any inspiration board. The room should be built around it, not the other way around.