Under-counter carcass and modular bar cabinetry

Carries the worktop, houses the equipment that lives below it, and decides whether any of that equipment can be serviced without dismantling the bar.

The carcass does three jobs and they pull against each other. It is structure — it transfers the deck's load and the machines' point loads into the floor, which is why plinth, levelling and fixing back to the building matter more than the door fronts anybody actually looks at. It is enclosure — it defines a void, and a void that is sealed traps heat and moisture while a void that is open takes in spillage and vermin, so the resolution is always a deliberate pattern of openings rather than a choice between the two. And it is ACCESS, which is the job it usually fails. Anything under a counter has to come out to be repaired: a refrigeration unit whose condenser needs cleaning, a pump, a filter head, a waste bin, an isolation valve. If the only way out is to unbolt the worktop, then in practice that item is serviced late, cleaned rarely, or replaced with the cheapest thing that fits the hole. The mechanism that ties all three together is airflow. Self-contained refrigeration under a counter rejects heat into the void it sits in, and if that heat cannot leave, the condenser sees its own exhaust, the compressor runs longer, the cabinet drifts and the failure is diagnosed as a fridge fault when it is a joinery fault — the fridge is doing exactly what it was built to do, in a box that was built to look continuous. That is why a modular arrangement, where units sit in a frame with defined gaps, and a bespoke arrangement, where units are boxed in by a carpenter working from an elevation, produce completely different service lives from identical equipment.

• Build the carcass around a FINAL equipment schedule, with each appliance's installed dimensions, weight, service-access side and ventilation requirement taken from its own documentation. Every one of those four is a different number and joinery drawn from the first two alone will trap the appliance.
• Make every appliance removable by one person without touching the worktop. Removable front panels, a service gap at the sides, no plumbing or cabling that has to be cut to get a unit out. If you cannot describe how a unit comes out, it does not come out, and its cleaning schedule is fiction.
• Treat heat as the design driver under the counter, not storage. Self-contained refrigeration and any heat-rejecting appliance need a path in and a path out, and the hot corner of a bar is usually the corner where three of them were fitted side by side because that is what the elevation allowed.
• Decide plinth or legs with the person who will inspect the site, and decide it before the floor finish is chosen, because a sealed plinth has to be built onto a floor that is already right and legs have to stand on a floor that can be cleaned under them.
• Specify the interior surfaces as seriously as the fronts. Cups, lids and vessels live in there, so the inside is a food-contact-adjacent surface and needs to be wipeable, coved where it can be, and free of raw cut edges that hold water.
• Give the modular-versus-bespoke decision to whoever is accountable for the bar in the third year, not the first. Bespoke wins the opening photograph; modular wins every equipment change after it, and equipment changes are certain.
• Position isolation — valves, switches, drain points — where they can be reached during service by a person who is already stressed. A shut-off nobody can find is a shut-off nobody uses, and the reason it is being looked for is never a calm one.
• Level the run on the actual slab, not the drawing. Doors, drawers and appliance seals all depend on it, and a carcass levelled with packers on an uneven floor is a set of drawers that stop closing within the year.