Buying Guides
Kitchen Cupboard Doors: Start With the 715mm Check
By the Hill & May team
Updated 2026
Most people looking at kitchen cupboard doors are not planning a new kitchen. They are looking at carcasses that are structurally fine and fronts that have gone tired, chipped or simply out of fashion, and wondering whether they can swap one without the other. Usually the answer is yes, and the whole job turns on two measurements: the door height, which in Britain is almost always 715mm on base units, and the position of the hinge holes, which is not standardised at all.
Get those two right and you can reface an entire kitchen for a fraction of a rip-out. Get the second one wrong and you have a stack of doors that will not hang. This guide covers sizes, the hinge trap, what each door material actually does after five years of steam, and when replacing the doors is the wrong call.
The size ladder
Kitchen cupboard doors are sized off the carcass, and the carcass sizes are covered in full in our kitchen cabinet sizes guide. The short version for doors:
Base unit doors: 715mm high. The carcass is 720mm, and the door is cut a few millimetres shorter so it clears the worktop rail and the unit above or below it. 715mm is the figure you will see on nearly every made-to-measure supplier’s standard list.
Wall unit doors: 715mm or 570mm. A standard 720mm wall unit takes the same 715mm door as a base unit, which is why a fitted kitchen looks so consistent. The 570mm door belongs to the shorter wall units that sit over a hob, an extractor or a fridge.
Tall and larder doors: almost always a pair, one long door over a shorter one, rather than a single 2000mm slab. A single door that tall would sag on its hinges and twist with the seasons.
Drawer fronts: a separate ladder entirely, commonly around 140mm, 283mm and 355mm high, and measured off the drawer box rather than the carcass opening.
Widths follow the unit widths, minus a small gap. A 600mm unit takes a door in the high 500s; a 500mm unit takes one in the high 400s. The exact allowance varies between suppliers, which is precisely why you should never order from the carcass width. Measure the door you are taking off.
The hinge holes are the real compatibility question
Every standard UK cupboard door is bored for a concealed cup hinge. The cup itself is a 35mm diameter hole, drilled about 11.5mm to 12.5mm deep, with its centre set roughly 22.5mm in from the edge of the door.
Those three numbers are consistent across the industry. What is not consistent is where those holes sit vertically. One manufacturer puts the top cup 95mm down from the top edge, another puts it at 100mm, another at 80mm. Nothing forces agreement, and a 15mm discrepancy means your existing hinge plates on the carcass no longer line up.
So before you order anything, take one door off and record four figures:
- Height and width, in millimetres, measured on the door itself
- Top edge to the centre of the top hinge cup
- Bottom edge to the centre of the bottom hinge cup
- How many cups the door has (tall doors often take three, or four)
Any decent made-to-measure supplier will bore to your figures at no extra cost, because it is a machine setting. The risk sits entirely with off-the-shelf doors bored to someone else’s standard. If you are buying those, check the boring dimensions on the product page against your own numbers before you buy, not after.
One escape hatch: hinge plates on the carcass are adjustable in three axes, but only by a few millimetres. They will absorb a small error in alignment. They will not absorb a hole in the wrong place.
IKEA kitchens are a separate world
If your carcasses are IKEA METOD, high street replacement doors will not fit and it is not close. METOD works on its own size grid in centimetres rather than the British 715mm convention, so a 40cm by 60cm cabinet takes a 397mm by 597mm door and a 40 by 80 takes 397mm by 797mm. The hinge system is IKEA’s own too.
This is not a dead end. Several UK suppliers exist purely to make replacement fronts on the IKEA grid, and they are how people put a solid oak or hand-painted front on a METOD frame. Just do not order from a standard British door list and expect it to hang.
What the materials actually do over time
Nearly every door on the market is one of a handful of constructions, and DIY Kitchens sets them out clearly from a manufacturer’s point of view. The buying decision is less about how they look on day one and more about how they fail.
Vinyl or foil wrapped MDF. A thin plastic or resin-impregnated paper skin heat-wrapped over a routed MDF core. It is the cheapest way to get a shaker profile or a gloss finish, and it is genuinely water resistant across the face. The failure mode is always the same and always in the same three places: the door beside the dishwasher, the door above the oven, and the door where the kettle sits. Steam works its way into the edge seam and the wrap lifts. Once it starts peeling it cannot be repaired, only replaced. If you buy wrapped doors, plan the kettle position away from them.
Painted or lacquered MDF. Primed, sprayed, oven-cured, de-nibbed, top-coated and cured again. The finish is uniform, the colour range is unlimited, and crucially it is repairable: a chipped edge can be filled and touched in, and the whole set can be resprayed in ten years. It chips more easily than a wrap does on impact, which is the trade. For most kitchens this is the sensible default.
Painted timber, usually oak. The traditional country kitchen door, and the one that ages best because the substrate is real. It also moves. A solid frame expands and contracts with humidity through the year, which is why paint sometimes cracks at the joint between stile and rail. That hairline is a characteristic of the construction, not a defect, and a good painter allows for it.
Melamine faced chipboard. Resin-coated softwood particles pressed and faced with a decorative melamine layer. Cheapest of the lot, dimensionally stable, and fine in a rental or a utility room. The edges are the weakness, and once the edge banding lifts the board takes on water.
Acrylic faced MDF. A high gloss acrylic layer that reads like glass at a fraction of the cost, and unlike a gloss wrap it can be buffed to take out light scratches. It shows every fingerprint and every speck of dust, which is the real reason people either love it or regret it within a year.
Style, briefly
Shaker still dominates British kitchens and is available in every one of the constructions above, from a wrapped MDF budget door to a hand-painted oak one that costs ten times as much and looks it. The detail that separates them is the frame width and the depth of the centre panel rebate; our shaker kitchen guide goes into where the money shows.
Slab doors are the other half of the market, and the choice there is really about handles: a slab door with no handle needs either a J-pull profile, a routed groove or push-to-open hinges, all covered in our in-frame versus handleless comparison. If you are keeping the doors and only changing the ironmongery, the door handles guide covers the fixing centres to check first.
Replace, paint, or start again
Three honest options, in ascending cost.
Paint the doors you have. Only worth doing on solid timber or painted MDF. A vinyl-wrapped door can be painted, but adhesion is poor and the result rarely lasts, and it will still peel at the steam-damaged edge underneath. Our cupboard painting guide covers the preparation, which is where these jobs succeed or fail.
Replace the doors and drawer fronts. The right answer when the carcasses are sound, the layout works and you simply want a different kitchen to look at. Add new hinges while you are at it. They are inexpensive, the old ones are usually tired, and fitting new doors to twenty-year-old hinges is a false economy.
Replace everything. Justified when the layout is wrong, the carcasses have swollen at the base from a leak, or the units are a size that no longer matches anything you can buy. At that point you are into a full project, and our kitchen renovation cost guide is the place to start. An ex-display kitchen is worth considering before you commit.
Frequently asked questions
What is the standard size of kitchen cupboard doors in the UK? Base unit doors are almost always 715mm high, sitting on a 720mm carcass. Wall unit doors are 715mm on a full height unit or 570mm on the shorter units over a hob or fridge. Widths follow the unit width less a small gap that varies between suppliers, so measure the door rather than the cabinet.
Can I replace just the kitchen cupboard doors and keep the units? Yes, and it is the standard way to reface a kitchen. The carcasses do the structural work and the doors are simply hung on adjustable hinges. The one thing that stops it is a carcass that has swollen or delaminated at the base, usually from a slow leak under a sink, which needs replacing rather than dressing up.
Will new doors fit my existing hinges? Only if the hinge holes line up. The 35mm cup diameter and the 22.5mm inset from the edge are industry standard, but the vertical positions are set by each manufacturer and differ by 15mm or more. Measure from the top and bottom edges to the centre of each cup, and give those figures to a made-to-measure supplier who will bore to match.
Do replacement doors fit an IKEA kitchen? Not standard British doors. IKEA METOD uses its own size grid, with a 40cm by 60cm cabinet taking a 397mm by 597mm door, and its own hinge system. Several UK suppliers make replacement fronts specifically on the IKEA grid, so the upgrade is possible, but you must order from an IKEA-specific range.
Which kitchen door material lasts longest next to a dishwasher? Painted MDF or painted timber. Vinyl and foil wrapped doors are the ones that peel, and it happens at the edges beside dishwashers, above ovens and wherever a kettle steams. Wrapped doors are perfectly good elsewhere in the run, so one option is to specify a different material for the two or three doors in the steam zone.
Is it cheaper to paint kitchen cupboard doors or replace them? Painting is far cheaper if the doors are solid timber or painted MDF, because you are buying paint and time rather than product. It is a poor idea on vinyl wrapped doors, where adhesion is unreliable and any lifted edge stays lifted. If a wrapped door has already started peeling, replacement is the only durable fix.
