We made a B&Q kitchen look bespoke and saved thousands – how just a handful of small decisions completely changed the finish
Our in-frame trick makes the biggest visual difference
Committed home renovators David and Andrew Harrison-Colley (better known on Instagram as The Home Boys) are part of Ideal Home's new Open House contributors, sharing their thoughts on making a home together and living through the tricky parts. See the rest of their articles here.
The single question we get asked more than any other on Instagram is some version of: “That’s really B&Q?”.
It is. Every base unit and door/drawer front of our kitchen came from B&Q’s GoodHome range. The whole thing came in at roughly £5,000 all in (excluding appliances) – which, when people imagine an in-frame style cottage kitchen with shaker doors, antique brass style handles, oak worktop and a quartz top on the island, tends to come as a surprise.
There’s no big secret to it. Just a handful of small decisions that, layered together, completely changed the finish. This is the first of two pieces on how we did it. Today: the perimeter units, the in-frame trick that makes the biggest visual difference, and the finishes that pulled it all together. Part 2 will cover the island we hand-built around our integrated fridge and freezer for under £300 (excluding the quartz worktop).
Why we went DIY (again)
We did the same thing in our Brixton flat – a budget IKEA kitchen we customised ourselves - and learned that you really can get the look of a much more expensive kitchen if you put the time in. So when it came to the cottage, we knew we wanted to repeat the trick.
Going DIY also gave us flexibility. Our layout changed once we started living in the space – the original symmetrical run-and-island plan didn’t work for how we use the space, so we added a left-hand return to make an L-shape. Because we’d built it ourselves, we just bought a few more cabinets and adapted.
Why GoodHome rather than a bespoke maker
B&Q’s GoodHome range sits in their mid-tier. Solid carcasses, decent soft-close hinges, and – importantly – a shaker door style that doesn’t scream flat-pack.
For the perimeter, we used GoodHome’s Ashmead Matt fronts in Pebble – a soft greige that reads warmer or cooler depending on the light. Straight off the shelf, no repainting required.
For the island (more on that in Part 2), we primed and repainted matching Ashmead doors and drawer fronts in Dulux Heritage Brushed Gold to tie them in with the beadboard cladding.
The in-frame trick (the bit that does the heavy lifting)
If you take one thing from this article, it’s this: the difference between a flat-pack kitchen that looks flat-pack and one that looks bespoke is almost entirely about the gaps.
On a standard fitted kitchen, the cabinet doors sit flush next to each other with a thin shadow gap between them. On a proper in-frame kitchen – the kind that costs five times as much – each door is set inside its own painted timber frame. That extra bit of frame around every door is what gives the kitchen its weight, its rhythm, its quietly handmade look.
You can fake it. We did. Between every cabinet on our perimeter run, we cut down lengths of matching plinth and fitted them vertically and horizontally around the cabinet frames as filler panels between the doors. Painted in the same colour as the cabinet fronts, they read instantly as in-frame detailing rather than what they actually are: a clever bit of plinth doing double duty.
It’s the single biggest visual upgrade we made and it cost almost nothing. A few extra metres of plinth, a mitre saw, and patience.
The finishes that pulled it all together
Once the cabinets are in and the in-frame illusion is in place, the finishes are what take a budget kitchen the rest of the way. We kept it simple.
- Paint. The perimeter cabinets came pre-finished in GoodHome’s Ashmead Matt Pebble – we didn’t paint those at all. The island doors and drawer fronts were primed and painted in Dulux Heritage Brushed Gold (a furniture paint, applied with a foam roller for that smooth factory finish). Three coats. Worth every minute.
- Handles. Antique finish brass cup handles on the drawers, antique brass knobs on the upper doors – both from B&Q. Mixing the two gave us a more collected, less showroom feel, like things had been chosen over time rather than ordered in a single click.
- Worktop. Solid unfinished oak from Express Worktop, sealed with several coats of Osmo Top-Oil. We chose it because it warms the whole room up in a way stone just doesn’t, and it ties beautifully into the timber beams overhead.
- Open shelves. Instead of more wall cabinets, we ran two long oak shelves on simple cast brackets. Cheaper than upper cupboards, and a place to display the vintage china and brass scales we’ve been collecting for years, and handy for all the daily essentials too.
What we’d say to anyone thinking about doing the same
- Order a few extra cabinets. Layouts change once you’re in the space. Having a couple of spares meant we could pivot to an L-shape and collect the additional cabinets within a few hours from our local store.
- Do a flatlay before you commit. We laid out a sample door, a paint swatch, the worktop offcut, the handles and our terracotta flooring on the floor and stared at it for days. Some combinations died at that stage, which saved us from making expensive mistakes.
- Mix your handle styles, not necessarily your finishes. One handle on every door is a quick way to make a kitchen look catalogue-ordered. We used cup handles on drawers and knobs on doors, both in the same antique brass finish, which softened the look without making it feel busy.
- Live with a temporary worktop. If your dream worktop is out of budget right now, fit a plywood placeholder painted in floor paint. It buys you months of usable kitchen while you wait for the right deal.
- Don’t skip the plinth trick. Genuinely. It’s the difference between flat-pack and bespoke and it costs less than a takeaway.
Standing in the kitchen now – ochre island, grey-green perimeter, terracotta floor running underneath the lot – it doesn’t look like a £5,000 kitchen. Which is the entire point.
In Part 2, we’ll walk you through how we built the island around an integrated fridge and freezer for under £300, including the beadboard cladding that ties it back to the rest of the cottage.
