I Found a 3-Minute Hack to Recreate This Gorgeous Kitchen Detail

If your dream is to craft a home that embodies an antique English country vibe, then vented cabinet doors have probably been on your inspiration board for a while. These doors’ cutouts, which became popular during the Georgian era, helped provide air circulation in built-in pantries and came in many forms (the most popular being small circles and slashes). Editors at Apartment Therapy predicted they’d make a comeback in popularity just last year — and since then, the detail has cropped up in real homes (including the renovated Vermont farmhouse shown below). 

They give the doors a charming dose of personality that many people want to mimic today, but as anyone who has remodeled a kitchen will tell you, custom cabinetry is a massive expense. So, that’s where stickers might come in handy. Yes — you read that right.

Molly Saint from @houseofsaintdesign on Instagram shared how she made her kitchen cabinets look a bit more Georgian by using black sticker dots she sourced from Amazon.

“Wait what!!!! This is genius omg,” one person commented on Molly’s post. Another person said, “So simple yet a massive game changer!”

“A simple little sticker hack, but it makes plain cabinets look so much more custom,” Molly wrote in the caption of her recent video. “They come right off if you don’t love the look or get sick of it, which is perfect for my always changing mind! … Also addicted to making everything in my home have English cottage charm, so these did the trick.”

Rather than take a drill to your kitchen cabinets to achieve the look of vented doors while sticking to your budget, black adhesives make the project totally reversible (this means they’re renter-friendly, too!). You can experiment with various sizes, but this sticker sheet from Amazon comes with 3/4-inch dots that will likely work with most doors.

Decide which dot pattern you’d like to go with, then map out where the center of your door is and go from there. The possibilities are endless!

Of course, the closer you can get to the stickers, the more you’ll be able to tell that they’re stickers and not actual cutouts. But for cabinets that are higher up, like Molly’s, these stickers will definitely look like the real thing.

For just $6, you can get the custom English cottage cabinetry of your dreams — no power tools required!