Auburn Kitchen & Bath Remodel — Bellmont 1300 Oak and White Cabinetry with Sustainable PET Film
Two-Tone Frameless Design, Waterfall Island & Toe-Kick LED Lighting
This Auburn home — just outside Enumclaw — used the Bellmont 1300 series across the kitchen and bathrooms. Light oak on the bases, matte white on the uppers, slim matte black hardware throughout. What sets this cabinet line apart from a standard wood-grain kitchen is the construction: the door fronts aren’t wood veneer or melamine. They’re PET film made from recycled plastic bottles — roughly 25 bottles per door, pressed and finished to look and feel like real wood.
This was a remodel, not a finish-only renovation. What changed: the cabinetry, the counters, the appliances, the lighting, the plumbing fixtures, and the layout details that turn a standard kitchen into a working one.
Why PET Film Cabinets Are Worth Knowing About
Most kitchen cabinets at this aesthetic level use one of three door materials: real wood veneer, melamine, or thermofoil. Each has tradeoffs. Wood veneer looks the best but scratches and shows water damage. Melamine is durable but visibly fake on close inspection. Thermofoil peels at the edges over time, especially near heat sources.
PET film (the material used on Bellmont 1300 doors) is a different category. The film is made from recycled polyethylene terephthalate — the same plastic used in water bottles, processed into a durable laminate that bonds to the door substrate. The visible result is a wood-look surface that resists scratches, moisture, and heat better than real wood, doesn’t peel like thermofoil, and reads as wood at normal viewing distance. The environmental story is real — each door uses around 25 recycled bottles — but the durability story is what makes it the right specification for a working kitchen. For homeowners who like the look of natural wood but worry about how it ages near a sink or a cooktop, PET film is the practical answer.
Two-Tone, Done with the Right Hierarchy
The two-tone configuration here is light oak below, white above. Not the only way to do two-tone, and not the most common — most projects flip it (white below, wood above) because they want to feature the wood as an accent. We covered the same logic in a previous project: heavy color belongs at the floor, light color belongs at the ceiling, and putting wood on the bases makes the room read as a wood kitchen with white moments instead of a white kitchen with wood moments.
In this kitchen specifically, the choice also serves the marble-look quartz. The strong gray veining on the counters needs visual room — if the cabinetry above the counters were also bold (dark wood, deep color), the room would feel busy. White matte uppers give the counters space to be the second visual feature after the cabinetry color split itself. Three loud elements in a row would have been too much; two loud elements with a quiet third is the rule that lets a kitchen feel designed without feeling crowded.
The Lighting Details Most Renovations Skip
This kitchen has three layers of lighting that aren’t always present even in higher-end remodels: recessed ceiling lighting for general illumination, under-cabinet LED strips on the uppers for task lighting, and toe-kick LED strips at floor level under the base cabinets. The last one is the surprising one.
Toe-kick lighting does two things. At night, it acts as ambient light — you can walk through the kitchen for water at 2 a.m. without flipping on a harsh overhead. During the day, it visually lifts the cabinetry off the floor, which makes the bases read as floating rather than sitting heavy. It’s the kind of detail that costs almost nothing in the context of a full remodel but transforms how the kitchen feels during use. We recommend toe-kick lighting on any remodel that includes a meaningful base cabinet run.
The Bathrooms — Same Construction, Different Door Style
The vanities use the same Bellmont line but a different finish — White Matte Apex, the slab-style door in white. Same frameless construction, same PET film durability, but the design language steps from oak-and-white in the kitchen to all-white in the bathrooms. This is intentional. The kitchen carries the wood character of the home; the bathrooms read calmer and brighter, which is what most homeowners actually want in spaces used for showering and getting ready.
The rule across multi-room remodels: keep one or two elements consistent across rooms (in this project, the frameless construction and the matte black hardware), then let the rest vary. The continuity is unconscious but the differentiation lets each room have its own character. If you’re planning a kitchen remodel in Auburn or the greater Enumclaw area and considering doing the bathrooms at the same time, this is the configuration that makes one project feel coordinated without making every room look identical. Cabinets Core can walk through which elements are worth carrying and which should stay specific.
