Kitchen Cornice and Pelmet: Profiles, Fitting, and What to Buy

Your kitchen fitter finishes on a Friday. The carcasses are level, the doors are aligned, and the worktops are on. You walk in on Saturday morning and notice the cornice sits 8mm behind the line of the doors. The whole top of the run looks set back, the shadow line is wrong, and the LED strip you specified is visible from across the room because the pelmet was fitted flush instead of projecting. The fitter is on to the next job. Tearing a cornice run off MFC carcasses damages the finish, and replacement lengths from a discontinued range cost more than the original supply. Getting the trim spec and fitting sequence right before the van arrives is what separates a kitchen that looks fitted from one that looks finished.

What it is and what it's for

Cornice is the decorative moulding fitted across the top of a run of wall units. Pelmet is the matching strip fitted to the underside. Both are finishing trim, not structural elements, and both come in lengths matched to the door range so colour, grain, and finish line up with the fronts.

Cornice has two jobs. It caps the raw top edge of the carcass, and it closes or disguises the gap between the top of the unit and the ceiling. Pelmet (sometimes called a "light pelmet" when it's the type with an internal groove) caps the underside of the unit, conceals the raw edge of the door when it's shut, and provides a channel to hide LED strip lighting and its cable run.

The distinction matters when you're ordering. Cornice sits above the unit, pelmet below. Retailers sometimes sell the same profile as "cornice/pelmet" because the mouldings are often interchangeable, but the fitting method and the decisions around each one are different.

There is no statutory regulation governing cornice or pelmet specification. Building control has no interest in kitchen trim. Planning permission does not apply. Your only constraints are the finish of your door range, the ceiling height, and how you want the lighting to sit.

Profile families

The trim profile is the cross-section shape. Three families cover almost every kitchen on the UK market.

Square profile is the workhorse. Flat faces, square edges, minimal projection. A 35mm square cornice handles most modern and shaker kitchens and is forgiving to cut. If your kitchen is handleless, square is effectively the only correct choice because anything shaped clashes with the flat-front aesthetic.

Tangent profiles have a gentle curve or chamfer on the face. They bridge modern and traditional without committing to either. The curve is unforgiving at mitres because any angle error shows as a visible step across the curved face, so the saw work needs to be accurate.

Classic profile is what you use on in-frame, farmhouse, and period-style kitchens. The ogee or ovolo shape is large (often 75mm high), projects further from the carcass, and demands compound mitre cuts (bevel around 33.9 degrees, mitre around 31.6 degrees) to produce a true 90-degree external corner. Shaped cornice on a modern kitchen looks wrong. Square cornice on a traditional painted kitchen looks cheap. Match the profile to the door.

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Material options

The substrate under the finish matters more than most guides admit. The finish is what you see. The substrate is what determines how well it cuts, how it behaves in a humid kitchen, and whether it chips at the mitre.

Vinyl-wrapped MDF. The standard for most retail and trade kitchen ranges (Howdens, Magnet, Wickes, B&Q GoodHome). MDF core with a vinyl foil wrap fused to the face and edges. Consistent colour throughout the length. Cuts cleanly with a fine-tooth blade. Can chip at the cut edge if the blade geometry is wrong or the feed rate is too fast. The most common and most forgiving option.

MFC (melamine-faced chipboard). Used on some Wickes ranges and lower-cost trade products. Chipboard core with a melamine surface. Slightly more moisture-resistant at the cut edge than plain MDF. Looks very similar to vinyl-wrapped MDF once fitted. Slightly harder on the saw blade.

Foil-wrapped MDF on high-gloss and acrylic finishes. The prestige modern look - mirror-gloss whites, deep graphites, metallic finishes. Prone to edge chipping. A standard fine-tooth blade will tear the gloss film at the cut. You need a triple-chip negative-rake blade (often sold as an "MDF" or "melamine" blade) and a sliding compound mitre saw. On a sliding saw, pull the blade to its full reach, plunge into the cut, then push through. Pushing only produces chips at the exit edge. Experienced fitters report that perfect cuts on high-gloss are genuinely difficult even in showrooms.

Painted MDF and solid timber. Premium painted ranges and traditional in-frame kitchens. Painted MDF takes a touch-up well if the cut chips. Solid timber (usually tulipwood or oak) is the most forgiving to cut and the most stable in humid environments. Also the most expensive.

Standard lengths (and why they catch people out)

This is the single most common ordering mistake. Cornice and pelmet are sold in fixed lengths per retailer, and the lengths do not match across retailers.

If you measure a kitchen and calculate "I need 9.6m of cornice, that's four 2.4m lengths", you've assumed a length that may not exist. If the product is 2.6m or 3m, your quantity is wrong and your spend is wrong. Check the specific product page before you order.

The IKEA METOD exception

IKEA's METOD system does not use "cornice" or "pelmet" as product terms. Homeowners comparing an IKEA kitchen to a Howdens or Wren kitchen are often confused by what's missing.

The IKEA equivalent of a pelmet is the deco strip or deco moulding (product names include FORBATTRA, BODBYN, STENSUND, HAVSTORP, depending on which door range you've specified). Deco strips run below wall units in 2.21m lengths, in range-matched finishes, and cost £19-29 each. They're cut to length on site. Functionally they do the same job as a traditional pelmet.

IKEA METOD does not offer a true cornice. There is no top-of-unit decorative cap in the METOD range. IKEA's design logic is that wall units either go to ceiling height (an extra tall unit on top of a standard one) or leave a deliberate exposed gap as a design feature. Homeowners who want a capped top edge on a METOD kitchen have two options: fit a third-party cornice profile from a kitchen accessory supplier and accept that the finish match won't be exact, or add a tall unit on top to close the ceiling gap.

The cover strips IKEA sells (at around £10 per 2.2m length) are vertical joint concealers for gaps between cabinets. They are not cornice.

Fitting sequence

Cornice and pelmet are the last stages of kitchen fitting. Everything upstream has to be right before they go on.

Pre-requisites:

• All wall units hung, levelled, and connected to their neighbours
• End panels fitted and flush with the door line
• Doors hung and aligned (the cornice and pelmet align to the doors, not the carcass)
• Under-cabinet LED strip, aluminium channel, and driver positioned on the carcass (the pelmet encloses them, so they must be installed before the pelmet is fitted)
• Worktops installed and sealed

Cornice

Cornice is fitted first, from the top down.

1. Measure the run. Mark where 45-degree mitres are needed at each open external corner. Mark 90-degree square cuts where the run terminates against a wall or a fixed end panel.
2. Cut on a compound mitre saw. Square profiles cut at 45 degrees on a flat-laid saw. Shaped profiles need a compound mitre setup (around 33.9 degrees bevel, 31.6 degrees mitre for a true 90-degree external corner).
3. Screw joining blocks (small L-shaped brackets sold with the cornice) to the rear of the cornice at 400mm intervals before you lift it into position. These are what you screw down through into the top of the carcass.
4. Apply mitre bond adhesive to all mitred joint faces. Mitre bond is a two-part cyanoacrylate-activator system. Paint the activator on one face, the glue on the other, press together. It sets in 10-30 seconds. Do not rely on screws alone; seasonal movement opens ungired mitres.
5. Two people fit it. One holds the cornice flush with the face of the doors. The other drives screws down through the joining blocks into the carcass top.
6. On classic profiles, external mitred corners need clamping for the full adhesive set time. Square profiles are less critical.

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Pelmet

Pelmet is fitted from below, after the cornice and after the lighting hardware is in position.

1. Measure the run under the wall units. Include returns at the ends.
2. Cut. Pelmet mitres behave the same as cornice: 45-degree on external corners, 90-degree where the run terminates against an end panel. Where the pelmet butts into a fixed end panel, a square butt joint is acceptable (Wren Kitchens uses this method on flat-ended runs); elsewhere use mitres.
3. Apply mitre bond to mitred joints.
4. Fix upward into the underside of the carcass. Two methods: screws driven directly upward through pre-drilled holes in the pelmet into the carcass, or a batten screwed to the underside first and the pelmet then glued and pin-nailed to the batten.
5. The batten method is more secure and makes future access possible. If you ever need to replace the LED strip or rewire a driver, the pelmet can be prised off a glued batten without destroying the pelmet itself. Screws driven directly through the pelmet into MFC carcass underside tend to strip the next time you try to remove them.

LED hardware integration

Light pelmet exists specifically to house LED lighting. The sequence matters.

Before the pelmet goes on, the aluminium LED channel (sold in 1m or 2m lengths) is screwed to the underside of the carcass, as close to the front edge as the pelmet depth allows. The LED strip clips into the channel. The strip's cable runs back along the underside of the unit and up into the inside of the carcass, where it connects to the driver. The driver sits on top of the wall unit, hidden behind the cornice, and is accessible by lifting the cornice (another reason to fix cornice with screws through joining blocks rather than glued).

Colour temperature matching is the common oversight. If your kitchen ceiling spots are 3000K warm white, the LED strip must also be 3000K. A 4000K cool-white strip under units in a warm-white kitchen makes the worktop look clinical and the mismatch is obvious. Check the Kelvin rating before you buy the strip; it's stamped on the reel.

The pelmet depth must be enough to conceal both the channel and the LED emitter. A 50mm high pelmet is the standard light pelmet dimension. Less than 40mm and the LED spill line is visible from across the room when you sit at a kitchen island.

The ceiling gap decision

Your wall units finish somewhere short of the ceiling. What you do with the gap above the cornice defines how the kitchen reads visually.

Typical UK geometry. Wall units are 720mm high (or 900mm on tall handleless kitchens). They're hung with the top at around 2170mm from the floor. A standard UK ceiling is 2400mm. That leaves roughly 230mm above the top of the unit. A 35mm cornice closes 35mm of that gap. What happens to the remaining 195mm?

The 30-70mm gap is where most homeowners get it wrong. It's too small to get a cleaning cloth into but large enough that dust, grease, and spiderwebs accumulate and are visible from normal standing height. Either close it with an infill (MDF box or cut-down panel) or plan at the design stage to eliminate it by hanging units higher, using taller units, or dropping the cornice.

Plan the ceiling gap before the kitchen is ordered, not after it's fitted. Once the cabinets are hung and the cornice is on, changing the gap means removing and refitting trim, which is destructive to the finish.

How much do you need

Measure every wall unit run where cornice or pelmet will be fitted. Sum the widths. For every external corner (an open corner turning from one wall to another), add 400mm to the total. This accounts for the mitred cut, the wastage at the mitre, and the short return lengths at the sides of an end panel.

Divide by the product length for your specific retailer and round up. Add 10% wastage on top for mis-cuts, chipped ends, and offcuts too short to re-use.

Worked example. Kitchen with 1800mm of wall units on the back wall, 2400mm on the return wall, one external corner between them, and 600mm of returns on two end panels. Linear metres of cornice needed:

• 1800 + 2400 = 4200mm of main run
• Add 400mm for the corner = 4600mm
• Add 600mm for the two returns = 5200mm

At B&Q with 2400mm lengths: 5200 / 2400 = 2.17, round up to 3 lengths. Add 10% wastage: still 3 lengths comfortably.

At Wickes with 2600mm lengths: 5200 / 2600 = 2, but you need a safety margin for mis-cuts so order 3.

At IKEA with 2210mm deco strips: 5200 / 2210 = 2.35, round up to 3. Same quantity of pelmet (deco strips only; no cornice equivalent in METOD).

Buy the same quantity of cornice and pelmet if you're fitting both. They run the same length.

Cost and where to buy

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Pricing varies heavily by profile, finish, and retailer. Budget square profiles in basic finishes start around £15. Mid-range matched-finish profiles are £30-45. Premium traditional profiles in quality painted or real-wood finishes run to £79 per length on B&Q's Tydeman range and higher on trade.

A typical fitted kitchen with four lengths of cornice and four lengths of pelmet runs £120-240 at budget tier supply-only, or £240-360 at mid-range. Labour is included in the kitchen fitter's overall installation day rate; cornice and pelmet are not normally itemised separately on a fitting quote.

Howdens is trade-only. You cannot buy Howdens cornice without a Howdens depot account. Third-party suppliers like repairmykitchen.com sell "Howdens-style" replacement profiles in custom lengths but explicitly warn that the match may not be exact, so always order a sample before committing quantity.

Alternatives

On handleless kitchens, pelmet and cornice are both genuinely optional. A slab-door handleless run with square carcass edges can look intentional and crisp without any trim at all, particularly when the end panels run past the top and bottom of the cabinet to frame the line. Consider fitting the kitchen without trim first, living with it for a day, then deciding. Cornice and pelmet can always be added after the fact; removing them once glued and screwed is destructive.

Light pelmet specifically is the most commonly retained element on modern kitchens because it conceals LED hardware. If you're fitting under-cabinet lighting, you need some form of trim to house the strip and channel unless you're using a surface-mount aluminium channel screwed directly to the carcass underside as a design feature.

On extra-tall wall units (900mm or 1000mm) that reach close to the ceiling, cornice can be skipped entirely. The top of the unit sits within a few centimetres of the ceiling, and a simple scribed fillet painted to match the ceiling closes the gap more neatly than a cornice would.

Matching cornice on a discontinued range

When a kitchen range is discontinued, sourcing exact-match cornice for a repair or extension becomes a real problem. Kitchen ranges are refreshed every 2-5 years. A minor refurb five years after the original fit-out usually means the exact finish is no longer stocked.

Options, in order of best match to worst:

1. Call the original retailer. Some ranges are supported with spare parts for several years after the range is withdrawn. Howdens keeps old range stock at some depots even after catalogue removal.
2. Third-party matching suppliers. Companies like repairmykitchen.com, Better Kitchens, Furniture Doors, and Just Kitchen Doors specialise in replacement cornice, pelmet, and doors for discontinued ranges. They offer "similar to" profiles in a wide range of finishes. Always order a sample length first; photo match is unreliable for gloss and wood-grain finishes.
3. Paint or re-wrap. If the original was a painted profile, matching paint is straightforward. If it was vinyl-wrapped, re-wrapping is possible but expensive and rarely worth it for a single length.
4. Replace the entire run. If you need more than one length and can't get a match, replacing all cornice across the affected run with a new matching profile is cleaner than mixing two similar-but-not-identical profiles.

The best defence is to buy one or two spare lengths with the original order and store them. Cornice takes up almost no space and costs £15-40 per length. An unused length in the garage is cheap insurance against needing to source a match in five years.

Common mistakes

Ordering based on assumed length. Not all cornice is 2.4m. Wickes is 2.6m or 3m. IKEA is 2.21m. Check the product page before you calculate quantity and don't trust a calculator that assumes a standard length.

Aligning cornice to the carcass instead of the door. The cornice face should line up with the front of the door, not the edge of the carcass. End panels that have been scribed too deep into a wall push the door face back from the carcass edge and cause the cornice to sit proud of everything downstream. Check door alignment before cutting any cornice.

Wrong blade on high-gloss profiles. A standard 40-tooth mitre saw blade chips high-gloss and acrylic-faced MDF cornice at the cut edge. Use a triple-chip negative-rake blade (often sold as "melamine" or "MDF" blade, typically 80 teeth). On a sliding compound mitre saw, pull the blade to full extension, plunge, then push through; pushing only produces exit-edge chips.

Relying on screws alone at mitres. Mitred external corners open up with seasonal movement when fixed with screws only. Mitre bond adhesive on every mitred joint face is standard practice. Without it, a joint that looks perfect on day one opens to a 1-2mm gap in six months.

Ignoring the 30-70mm ceiling gap. Unplanned small gaps between cornice and ceiling are dust traps and look unfinished. Decide at design stage whether to close the gap with an infill (MDF box or cut-down matching panel) or open it deliberately to 70mm+ as a design feature. The worst outcome is an accidental 50mm gap that the eye registers as a mistake.

Buying cornice only, not pelmet. Cornice without pelmet on a wall-unit run with under-cabinet lighting exposes the LED strip and cable to view from seated position at a kitchen island. If you have under-cabinet lighting, you need pelmet. If you don't have under-cabinet lighting, pelmet is still worth fitting to conceal the raw bottom edge of the door and the carcass underside.

Where you'll need this

Cornice and pelmet are fitted during kitchen installation at the end of the second-fix stage, but the ordering decisions are made much earlier:

• Sourcing units and worktops - cornice and pelmet are specified when you order the kitchen. Profile and finish must match the door range. This is where you also buy spare lengths for future repairs.
• Kitchen installation - the physical fitting sequence. All wall units hung, doors aligned, LED hardware in position before cornice and pelmet go on.

Cornice and pelmet are a small proportion of total kitchen cost but one of the most visible finishing details. A mitre that's 1mm out of line draws the eye every time you walk into the room for the next fifteen years. Getting the profile, the length, and the fitting sequence right at the design stage, and checking the finished work before the kitchen fitter's final day, is the difference between a kitchen that feels professionally finished and one that feels almost-but-not-quite right.