Face-Frame To Door Design Proprtions

[Howard Rosenberg]

have a face-frame / door question re a bookcase I want to start building that’ll be +/- 12” deep and +/- 18” wide.

I usually make my face-frames 1 3/4” wide and “wrap” the face-frame around the corners to create a frame and panel effect on the gables.

My questions revolve around the visual relationship between the door’s frame and the case’s face-frames.

With an inset door, how wide do you think the door’s frames surrounding the door's panel should be?
(I don’t want the front to look heavy between the face-frame and the door’s frame.)

With a door overlapping the face-frames, should the face-frames be wider so when the door is closed, the face-frames still shows 1 3/4”? Also, the same question re the door's frame width too.

[Jim Becker]

Chapter one of Jim Toplin's Measure Twice, Cut Once has some very good concepts on proportion...including the idea that viewing angle makes a difference in how you size things like rails and stiles on both face frames and doors. By viewing angle, I mean where the cabinet will be positioned in a room and from what height that folks will most often be looking at it. In other words, the answer to your quesiton has many forms depending on environment. That said, I mostly build things with inset doors. (Shaker or similar) I tend to use 1.25" for the top rails and 2" for the bottom rails on face frames. That just happens to look good to me. Stiles vary with the piece and door designs but they often are around 1.5" for end stiles and 1.25" for inner partitions, if not narrower, depending on the design. Doors usually have rail/stiles in the 1.5-2" range, depending on the scale of the piece.