If they’d been neatly squared up and tightly fitted to the cabinet fronts, with some sort of handle (and I don’t care greatly which), it’d look a whole lot better to me.

This is probably greatly affected by my personal taste…but you knew that.

And of course you have to tell them. In fact, it’s your very job to tell them, whether they ignore you or not. Often times, repeatedly. I have to say though, just because you *tell* the client the obvious doesn’t mean they listen. (back to the design tv hate for a moment)- one of the (endless) downsides of designTV is that there’s a lot of people out there who think that because they have a cable box, it makes them a designer and since it’s their house, they know all, right?

And then they regret it later and you get to do the I Told You So dance, so it works out.

You’re kidding… I think. I’m not sure, but I think you’re kidding.

In the event you weren’t actually kidding, I’m afraid I have to call bullshit. I’ve done high, high end/budget kitchen design. Just because you have lots of money doesn’t suddenly remove your ability/joy of cooking. It’s not like your bank account one day ticks over a certain amount and all of a sudden you think “whoops. That’s that, then. No more cooking for me!”

While you’re entirely correct that there’s a lot of people with the money to afford this stuff that couldn’t cook to save their ass and would only use it to store their restaurant takeout, that’s who they were *before* they had the money too. They didn’t just become that way then they made their first million. They were like that their whole lives. Having money doesn’t take your ability to cook away from you. It just means you can afford a professional working kitchen. If they loved to cook anyway, all that means is they have the ability to outfit the kitchen of their dreams.

in short, having enough money to afford this stuff != not being able to/wanting to cook.

By the way, if they’re the kind to hire someone to cook for them, their kitchen will get just as messy and worn looking as if they did it themselves. Having your kitchen redone is disruptive even when you have all the money in the world and can skip off to another house for a few months at a go. No one *enjoys* dumping that kind of cash/time/aggravation in a space every few years.

I’m sure there are people who would be perfectly happy with a kitchen like this, and of course, by necessity they’d need to have the money to afford it. But there is no correlation between simply having the money and not using your kitchen as anything more than a museum and a place to store your takeout.

I’m too used to seeing built-in cabinets; these just look like cheap, roughly made crap that someone threw in because they couldn’t afford better. Yes, I know that’s exactly the opposite of the truth, but…

One quick note. Though you need to keep your ego in check as a designer, I’d guess that you’d consider it responsible to point out potential problems you’ve identified to your clients.