8 Blind or Corner Kitchen Cabinet Solutions

Corner kitchen cabinets are often the loneliest, most remote space in a kitchen. It's not where you find the much-used, much-appreciated coffee cups or fine dinnerware. Rather, it's where you may find castaway plastic items from decades ago.

The official name for this place: blind cabinet corner. It's found in both kitchens or bathrooms—anywhere with cabinets—but mostly in kitchens because that's where you'll find cabinets that meet at corners.

Fortunately, there are a number of things you can do or accessories to add that make the blind cabinet corner a more liveable space.

3 Reasons Why Blind Corners Are Difficult

Kitchen cabinet corners, whether we're talking about bases (lower) or walls (upper), are deep, dark, and inaccessible. It's what happens when simple geometry meets up with most homes' scarcity of space. The name is simple: it's called a blind corner because, when reaching into it, you reach blindly:

Deep: Corners can be close to 50-percent deeper than cabinets on either side. For example, base cabinets tend to be 24 inches deep. But at corners, they are 34 inches deep.
Dark: Light is normally scarce in corner wall cabinets and even worse in corner bases. Adding a light in your blind corner cabinet is a thoughtful design consideration for an otherwise dark space.
Inaccessible: Reach is hard. If you're not trying to reach straight into the corner (a long distance), you're reaching into the sides, where you can't see.

Tip

Instead of trying to use the corner as a storage area—which entails daily usage and continual reaching far back in the cabinet for items—one idea is simply to eliminate the idea of a cabinet. Installing a wall oven in the corner works well because all of that hard-to-access dark corner area is occupied by the oven's electrical parts.

01 of 08

Taking Cabinet Blind Corner Access Beyond The Lazy Susan

Sabine Schoenberg, a successful kitchen designer and author of Kitchen Magic: Secrets to Successful Kitchens, says that "[c]orners in base cabinets are always tricky. Circular Lazy Susans used to be the only option. But fortunately today, there are great, so-called 'blind corner pullouts.'"

Blind corner pullouts are available from most major kitchen cabinet manufacturers at the time of installation. Alternatively, if you already have cabinets in place, companies like Rev-a-Shelf offer remodel solutions.
02 of 08

Swing Out Cabinet Base Is Like a Smarter Lazy Susan

Cabinet manufacturer Merillat devised a base cabinet swing-out that solves many problems. The two drawers on the right: they don't reside there. They slid over from the right-hand side, from deep in the corner. That's how the swing-out shelf can pivot and fit into the cabinet.
03 of 08

The Much-Evolved Cabinet Lazy Susan Swings and Pulls Out

Many lazy susans don't work very well. Most tellingly of their failure: round pegs don't fit into square holes. A lazy susan is the round peg that fits into the square hole only by shrinking it down so far. What about all of that wasted corner space?

Merillat put its collective cabinet-designing brainpower to the task with its two-tier lazy susan for bases. It does two things: first, it swings within the cabinet, then it pulls out of the cabinet for easy reach.
04 of 08

Classic Kitchen Lazy Susan

It's the one you've been waiting for, the friend of blind corners since Day One: the lazy susan.

This type works a bit better than the old-school kind because it's essentially a big circle—bigger than the base cabinet itself. But it has a 90-degree slice cut out of it to make it fit into the cabinet corner.

Continue to 5 of 8 below.
05 of 08

Blind Corners Partially Solved with Diagonal Cabinet

Another simple solution that goes a long way is the corner wall cabinet. It is a staple of good kitchen remodeling practice, and it does help mitigate blind corner problems.

You can still couple these types of cabinets with a classic, round lazy susan to increase access.

But one notable pitfall of these cabinets is that their doors are smaller than the interior space.
06 of 08

Staggered Wall Cabinets Help With Blind Corners

An unusual way to deal with blind corners is to stagger, or alternate, the cabinets as they go up the wall.

You're not buying yourself much more storage space this way. But it looks better than many other options.
07 of 08

Counter Corner Space is a Waste; Drawer Pull-Outs the Solution?

We forget about how much kitchen countertop space is wasted above those base cabinet blind corners and below wall cabinets, and you could do all sorts of things with it. Leave it that way. Or add angled drawers under the diagonal wall cabinet.

There will be some wasted space to the left and right of the angled drawers, dead zones built into the drawer to create 90-degree angles with the adjoining counters.

But if you can live with those two triangles of hollow space, angled drawers help fill in an otherwise forgotten corner.
08 of 08

Curved Cabinets Banish Blind Corners Because There Are No Corners

Another inventive solution for blind corners is to do away with the corners entirely.

Curved wall and base cabinets are a good, high-end solution to dark blind corners. Note, too, that it allows you to place your kitchen sink in that problem corner.

Curved cabinets are still not common, so expect to pay substantially higher prices for them.