Gola Handles Guide

[kat_euromax]

A Gola handle is a recessed channel handle that is set flush with the face of the cabinet, making it possible to open and close slab drawers/doors without modifying the door fronts at all.

I haven't seen a lot of posts about how to do this the way I want in Chief so I figured I would share my method.

 

The main problem with gola handle integration is that cabinet sides need cutouts so two neighbor cabinets can share the same piece of gola handle without a panel in between. Unfortunately the only workaround for this is to CAD a new cabinet side panel with cutouts, I import these as STL from external CAD, not too familiar with Chief's CAD tools but it's probably pretty easy in there too. I attached the 3DB side and door base side that I use. To adjust drawer heights CAD the assets again or just use stretch planes to relocate the cutouts.

 

Import STLs as Cabinet Door/Panel and then insert into cabinet under Front/Sides/Back > Left/Right > Custom Face > Side Panel - Inset. If this isn't sitting correctly then adjust in 3D settings for the asset in your user library, and clone the asset and flip 180 for the other side of the cabinet.

You need to change the construction settings to basically 'delete' the cabinet frame - even with "frameless" construction there is still a 'face frame' if you delete the cabinet side.

I set the overlap to 3/8" or 1/2", this is how far the doors/drawers will overlap the gola handle. (this also causes some issues but we'll fix it later).

now we're here:

In Front/Sides/Back > Front add an opening at the top and between each drawer, resize until they are the exact size of the cutouts on the sides and sit exactly over them.

 

Now we have a cabinet with a 0" face frame but a 3/8" overlay. This means there is no reveal around the edges of the doors so the door panels will extend ALL THE WAY to both sides of the cabinet, so in renders all the drawers in the run will blend together and you can't tell where each cabinet is. You can work around this by recessing the side panels only 9/16" into the cabinet (so they stick out on both sides 1/16"). This makes sizing cabinets a lot harder so I just work around this by using a custom slab door (attached) which is a slab door with a 1/16" x 1/16" stile on both sides, so even though the doors still run into each other it looks like there's a gap. This is pretty invisible (sometimes you need to switch back to slab doors if the weird edges are visible in renders with doors open). If you want to use Gola handles with a door style that isn't slab then CAD your own or just tell your client that slab doors will look better.

This also makes the drawer front stick out past the bottom of the cabinet, you can fix this with a larger horizontal separation on the bottom if it's an issue lining up with fillers etc.

 

Now I apply the gola handles as molding. Molding attached for the L-channel and C-channel handles. I use L-channel for the top drawer under the counter but you can also use C channel here. This should probably be made in Chief as a molding polyline but I haven't bothered to figure those out yet. So feel free to do that

Now we have realistic looking Gola handles that will run uninterrupted between cabinets in a run (not the best example because there's a big filler here but use your imagination).

I guess this is not the most popular style for cabinet construction outside of Europe but if anyone needs this guide I hope it's helpful.

 

 

Gola Assets.calib

[Renerabbitt]

8 hours ago, kat_euromax said:

I guess this is not the most popular style for cabinet construction outside of Europe but if anyone needs this guide I hope it's helpful.

It was helpful and good job. 
Making the side panels can be a pain if the end user wanted different drawer layouts and sizes...Im guessing its less common to show the side profile and more common to cover the side profile with an end panel so then I probably wouldn't bother making the side panels. In that case, just make your doors with the handle integrated..which actually I would just do that anyway.. here is a screenshot where the door and the cutout are all part of the cabinet door:

This will not show correctly in a vector elevation view if we did not have an end panel, in which case your method would be better.
But for other cases where you want to be able to dynamically resize your drawer fronts on the fly this works really well..and if you're using the L, it only takes 1 single custom cabinet door with appropriate stretch planes. Set your toe kick 3/4" shallower, and your countertop 3/4" longer and youre all set. 

 

[kat_euromax]

Thanks! I do use handles integrated into doors sometimes if I need to make changes on the fly. The issue I actually run into with these is when they're in the same run as a vertical gola handle (for tall cabinets or undercounter appliances). For these I place the gola channel vertically between cabinets and add a separate panel to act as the door which overlays the gola channel about 1/2". These can't be made with integrated handles as part of the doors since the cabinet box sizes will mismatch with what we actually need to manufacture. Then when they're in the same run as the integrated door handles the depth difference is noticeable in the render. I actually didn't think about making cabinet doors deeper so the channel sits further back which probably just fixes this issue entirely. Probably just a better method overall unless someone is really particular about making the 3D shapes in Chief match exactly what they'll look like in real life or if you do a lot of rendering with doors/drawers open. Thanks for the tip!!

[Renerabbitt]

6 minutes ago, kat_euromax said:

These can't be made with integrated handles as part of the doors since the cabinet box sizes will mismatch with what we actually need to manufacture

can you explain this more...keep in mind reported sizes can easily be manipulated with a macro. (Just trying to help) Also note that we can do some very advanced things with symbols in the stretch planes and bounding box offsets. can you show an example of what you are talking about?
Also yes absolutely, here to help. We can even make the drawer symbol offset in the y plane so that it sits flush against a face frame cabinet. 
The only draw backs to this method are the plan view representation of box size and the vector line at the drawer face in elevation.
The box size as stated can be reported as whatever we like to a schedule

 

[kat_euromax]

14 minutes ago, Renerabbitt said:

can you explain this more...

 

This example is the back of an island under an overhang so the doors can't open with a channel along the top. These are 28" cabinet boxes with vertical gola handles mounted in between and the doors are oversized (28 7/16"). So I guess the workaround would be to make each cabinet box 29 7/16" and make a new door profile include half of a gola C-channel? Seems like any workaround for this with integrated handles might not be worth the effort especially if we can adjust panel and toekick depth on the base cabinets with integrated handles to make all the handles appear at the same depth.