Complete Guide To Handle Sizing For Your Cabinet

Complete Guide To Handle Sizing For Your Cabinet

With a sea of size options for cabinet handles on offer, selecting the right size is a common conundrum that people often encounter. It is an equally important decision as choosing your handle designs. Picking the wrong handle size can make your handles look out of place and devalue your whole project. Read on to find out what sized handle work best for your cabinets and drawers. 

1. Understand how handles are sized

To be able to pick the right sized handles, you must first know how to read product specifications. These include:

- Center to center: the distance between the screw holes of the handle. Cabinet hardware stores often use this to name their sizes.

- Overall length: The total length of the handle. The center to center distance is usually standard and similar across different designs, for example, 96mm (3.8''), 128mm (5.0''), 160mm (6.3'') etc. However the overall lengths can vary due to the specific design of the handle. 

brass handle centre to centre and overall length dimension

1. Rule Of Third For Drawers

The most common rule used in determining the right handle size for drawers is a handle one third the width of your drawers.  Take the width of your drawers, divide it by 3 and the overall length of your handle should measure approximately that. 

In reality, the overall length of your handle could be slight off from your size calculation. In this case, you may allow the size to be within a 10% allowance. 

For example, for a 450mm width drawer, you would need a handle with an overall length of 135mm-165mm.

handle sizing rule for drawers with rule of third

2. Handle Sizing for Wall Cabinets

Wall cabinets are perhaps more lenient to sizing of your handles. For the majority of the time, people choose their drawer handles first and whatever goes with their drawers they would use that for their wall cabinets as they work with most standard handle sizes. 
Handle sizing for wall cabinets

  

3. Forget The Rules

Sometimes your opinion is all that matters. Some people like to make an impact with their handles and choose a much longer than standard size. Some others put two smaller handles on a wider cabinet.

There is no one size fits all. The rules are only there to help make the process easier for you, but remember it's all about you and what you like. So relax and have faith in yourself! 

Back to blog