Project: commercial casework against an exposed brick wall

Commercial casework running along an exposed brick wall, with open shelving above and a dark island below. Brick is the reason this job is worth writing up, because an exposed masonry wall breaks most of the assumptions cabinetry is built on.

Brick is not a straight line

A drywall partition is flat and predictable. Brick is neither. It bows, it steps at the mortar courses, and it is rarely plumb over the height of a run. Scribing a cabinet to brick is not a matter of shaving a millimetre off a filler, it is cutting a profile that follows a surface which changes along its length.

That work has to be done on site, with the cabinet in position, which means the sequence matters more than usual. The carcasses go in, the scribe is cut to the wall as it exists, and only then does the finished panel go on. Trying to do it the other way round produces a gap you cannot close.

Fixing into masonry

You cannot rely on finding a stud. Fixings go into the brick or the mortar with the right anchor for the substrate, and the load has to be calculated rather than assumed, because a loaded shelf run in a commercial space carries far more than the residential equivalent and gets used by people who did not pay for it.

Heritage or older masonry adds another constraint: drilling into the brick face rather than the mortar joint can be a problem for the building, so the fixing plan gets agreed before anything is cut.

Commercial finishes take a different beating

The specification difference between this and a residential kitchen is not the look, it is the duty cycle. A commercial door opens hundreds of times a week rather than dozens. Hinges are rated to the actual door weight, runners are chosen for cycles rather than price, and the edge detail on a high-traffic corner is the first thing to fail if it is specified as though it were a home.

Working from someone else’s drawing

Most commercial work reaches us as a design intent from an architect or designer rather than a brief from the end user. Our job is to produce shop drawings from that intent and flag anything that will not survive contact with the built condition before it goes to manufacture. On a brick wall that flagging is the whole value, because the drawing shows a flat plane and the room does not have one.

More on this kind of work is on the commercial cabinetry page and architectural millwork, and the cabinetry packages page sets out how larger scopes are priced.