Kitchen Awards and Flubs 2025

Main Line Kitchen Design recognizes new innovations in the kitchen design industry and gives our 2025 kitchen awards to cabinetry, countertop, appliance, hardware, and other industry products and companies that deserve honors. We also recognize trends, companies, and products that we see heading in the wrong direction.

Award for best new features in appliances goes to LG

The South Korean appliance make LG continues to have great innovations in the storage space, sizes, and features of their refrigerators. Their patented InstaView allows you to see your favorites with a knock on the InstaView® window without opening the door.

These models below provide extra space in the counter depth sizing that kitchen designers use constantly. Offering 33 and 24 inch widths is also unusual and liberating for experienced kitchen designers.

36-inch Wide Counter-Depth MAX™ Refrigerator – 26 cu. ft. – LCFC26XSS

33-inch Wide Counter-Depth Refrigerator – 19 cu. ft. – LRMNC1803S

23-inch Wide Bottom Freezer Refrigerator – 11 cu. ft. – LRBNC1104S

The Kitchen Design 2025 Flub Award in appliances goes to SubZero/ Wolf

While there is no question that Subzero offers the best refrigeration on the market and that Wolf sells great ranges, both continue to make kitchen designers’ lives difficult by designing sizes and showcasing installations that are problematic. While the SubZero Designer series is great, other Subzero series are problematic. For example, the SubZero standard refrigerator opening of 35.5 inches when the standard cabinetry opening is 36″. Another example is offering appliance panels on refrigerators that don’t appear integrated due to the large gaps needed to accommodate the space needed for the refrigerator doors to swing. Wolf also showcases flush installations on ovens that will be a fire hazard if the oven seal were to fail.

The 2025 Kitchen Hardware Award goes to Top Knobs

Top Knobs continues to offer the best variety and quality hardware on the market today. This is the reason that Main Line Kitchen Design sells Top Knobs exclusively.

The 2025 Hardware Flub Award goes to both The Home Depot and Lowes

While Lowes does a good job offering a nice and incredibly reasonable assortment of cabinetry handles and knobs, both big box stores are consistently short of the supply needed for most kitchens. Having to return multiple times to get additional handles or knobs frustrates homeowners and contractors.

2025 Kitchen Countertop Award goes to Intelco of Delaware Valley

Intelco is the countertop fabricator used by many kitchen showrooms around the Delaware Valley. Main Line Kitchen Design, Lowes, The Home Depot as well as many other kitchen cabinet showrooms use Intelco because of their great customer service. Best of all, because they are such a large fabricator they offer the best pricing per square foot and don’t charge for slab waste on most of their vast number of stock colors for Quartz and Granite.

2025 Kitchen Countertop Flub Award goes to Dekton

While Dekton offers beautiful countertop colors in THE MOST durable finishes, they still have not been able to get these patterns to continue on the edges of their tops. Most tops offer marble patterns on the top and plain white on the edges. This creates problems particularly since many Dekton sales people do not make the issue clear to customers. Beveling the edge becomes very expensive and still doesn’t look great to most designers as the edge is too angled. Dekton has been promising an imminent resolution to this problem for years now.

2025 Cabinet Company Award goes to Brighton Cabinetry

Brighton Custom Cabinetry offers craftmanship, quality, and customization made more affordable. Best of all for kitchen designers, Brighton Cabinetry uses 2020 Design Software for ordering instead of the many other less convenient methods used by most other custom cabinet makers. This makes pricing instantaneous for customers. Also because it’s so convenient, it helps keep costs down.

2025 Kitchen Cabinetry Flub Award goes to the KCMA

The KMCA lawsuit against cabinet importers has finally been resolved with a legal whimper and not a bang. In the process of this two plus year lawsuit, American Woodmark, MasterBrand Cabinets and Cabinetworks Group notified KCMA leadership of their resignation from the association. 

Main Line Kitchen Design is proud to be part of such a complex industry. In February 2025 we are looking forward to the Kitchen and Bath Industry Show hosted once again in Las Vegas.

Most importantly we wish all of our customers happy holidays . . .

. . . and of course . . .

BON APPETIT!