Pick the species for grain and color, and pick the hardware for the salt. Custom cabinets run $500 to $1,200 a foot, and $1,200 to $2,500 in the top band. Sea air reaches your hinges and runners long before it does anything to your wood.
People on the Nahant and Marblehead side ask Custom Cabinets Lynn about species first, and it is the wrong end of the question. A sealed cabinet inside your house is not where coastal air does its damage. Salt comes in through your open windows and screen doors and lands on metal. Plain steel hinge cups and slide bearings rust, your runners start to bind, and your doors drift out of line two to four years later. By then nobody connects it to the install.
So on any house near the water we order the rust-resistant finish on hinges, runners and screws. On the handles you will keep for decades we use solid brass or bronze rather than plated steel. Emtek makes an unlacquered brass that ages rather than wearing through, and that is the finish period buyers here ask for.
With that settled, your species choice is about how you want the kitchen to read. White oak is pale with an open grain. It takes a natural or fumed finish without going orange, and cut the way your quote will call quartersawn, it shows a flecked figure that suits an old house. Maple is close and even. It is the best of the three under paint and it takes a stain evenly. Cherry starts pink and darkens with the light, so the kitchen you sign off is not the kitchen you own in three years. People either love that or get caught out by it.
All three move with your heating season, so we leave the door panels loose in their frames whichever one you pick. Eagle Woodworking cuts drawer boxes in solid maple, white oak and walnut in Lawrence and Methuen. The bands are on our cabinet cost guide, and painted against stained covers what happens when you change your mind about the color later.
Related questions
Does salt air actually damage the wood?
Not inside your house in any way you would notice. A finished cabinet is sealed, and the humidity swing through your heating season moves the wood far more than the air off the water does. Your hardware is the part that is genuinely exposed.
Which of the three is best for painting?
Maple, because it has no open pores to show through the finish. Painting white oak means filling the grain first, which is extra prep time. Painting cherry throws away the one thing cherry does that the other two cannot.
Is white oak worth the top price band?
It is once you want it quartersawn with a period inset door, which together put you in the $1,200 to $2,500 a foot band. On a painted kitchen it is money spent on a grain nobody will ever see.