This Stylish Kitchen Drawer Trend May Look Great But Is Terrible For Functionality

Renovating a kitchen can be an exciting yet daunting task, with every decision from the type of faucet to the color of the backsplash falling in your lap. Your builder might ask how many cabinets you'd like and how many drawers, and if you weren't expecting this question, you might tell them to follow whatever's trending. When it's all said and done, your kitchen might look like something right off the cover of Better Homes & Gardens, but those three-foot-long drawers will be more of a hindrance than you ever expected.

Wide kitchen drawers are all the rage these days, but you have to think about not just their aesthetic, but their functionality, too, which isn't necessarily the best. There's nothing more annoying than cooking with a guest in the kitchen and asking them to take six steps back so you can open that gigantic drawer, only to smash their hip with the corner of the drawer anyway because you miscalculated just how big it was. Or think about how inconvenient it already is to go digging through multiple drawers for the utensil you can't find. Now picture doing this in a drawer double or triple the size with little to no built-in organization. Wider and deeper drawers might be able to store larger appliances, but they're not so great for neatly lining up all those whisks and spatulas you were looking forward to hiding, even if Giada De Laurentiis' must-have kitchen feature for easy storage helps a little bit.

A standard kitchen drawer is typically about 12-24 inches wide, but the extra-wide drawers that have become so popular are more like 24-36 inches wide. It's a design trend everyone seems to be following, just like these 13 kitchen design trends from 2025, though it's been building in notoriety for good reason: people want a way to minimize the number of visible handles in their kitchens. Instead of five or six visible drawer handles, a wider drawer gives off a feeling of "luxury" by cutting that number in half, but in the process, you're sacrificing the drawer's performance.

Not only are these wider drawers terrible when it comes to functionality, but they're not so great for longevity, either. Over time, wide drawers will begin to sag, especially if they're overloaded with heavy equipment. It's also not uncommon for wide drawer users to find that the rolling mechanism becomes sticky or broken over time, which is due to uneven weight distribution and the wear-and-tear of one side doing more work than the other. Despite its current place in the home renovation spotlight, we wouldn't be surprised if wide kitchen drawers join the ever-growing list of outdated kitchen design trends.