Davisville Kitchens

First I want to point out that this is a review of Davisville kitchens – not of the cabinet manufacturer they use or the installer crew they contract out to. The cabinetry maker makes very solid cabinetry, and the installer did a nice clean install job to the measurements he was provided. Davisville is a whole other story. To be clear, they are a sales/design/planning company – they don’t make the cabinetry and they contract out the installation. If you have your heart set on a kitchen made by their cabinetry maker you have a whole slew of reps in Toronto to choose from. I won’t recommend any of them in particular because I’ve only dealt with Davisville, but I have a hard time imagining any of them could screw up their end of the work as consistently as Davisville has. Here are some highlights:

1. 5 of our appliances don’t fit properly and the only reason for it is that they never read the installation instructions.

2. We have a side by side gas range and electric cooktop that are 4 inches wider than they accounted for leaving one of the gas burners under the cabinet instead of under the hood.

3. We have an under-counter freezer that was supposed to be flush mounted except that it needs a counter depth of 25 inches and they designed it for 23 ½

4. We have a main oven and a warming oven that are supposed to be in a wall cabinet except the opening for the main oven is 1 inch too big and the opening for the warming oven is 1 inch too small – so it doesn’t fit at all.

5. The dining area side of our peninsula lacks all the finishing elements so you can see particle board and appliances through the cracks between the panels.

We provided these people with exact model numbers long before the design and every single one of these manuals was available for download off the manufacturers site. Now I get that if you hire a “budget” company you might expect some amateur screw ups, but they’re representing a luxury brand with a price tag north of $40k. You’d think that for a project that size, someone might take the time to read the installation instructions.

That said – this isn’t the worst part of dealing with Davisville. We’ve had other contractors that mess up – it happens. A professional will own up to their mistakes and fix it –these people don’t know their head from a hole in the ground but will argue with you about basic physics like you’re the one that doesn’t get it. We had an absolutely asinine discussion with our “designer” about weather using flatter brackets would make a freezer designed for a 25in cavity fit into a 23 ½ in cavity that went something like this: “well you’re not a professional kitchen installer so how could you know.” I was morbidly curious at that point so I let them install the flat brackets just to see if the rules of physics were suspended that day (spoiler alert: they weren't).

Simply put - they messed up and they didn't want to take responsibility for their work. They did offer to push the other doors out to give an appearance of a flush look and add some filler paste to hide the gaps, and they really don’t get why we’d have a problem with this. Imagine one of the doors on your $40-thousand car won’t close properly so the dealer says well we can make them all not close and then you won’t notice. Makes sense- right?

We ended up with a protruding panel and a gap on the side of the peninsula. In addition to that, the whole counter vibrates every time the freezer drawer door is closed because the freezer is pushed right to the back panel. We can’t even fix it now because Davisville told us to go ahead and put the counter tops on before they tested the fit of the appliances so now we’d have to rip those off to make the peninsula wider to fit the freezer. Davisville’s owner's response was that the result is "well within tolerances" and that "we can't expect perfection". Adjust your expectations accordingly.

I’d hazard a guess that we’re not the only ones to have had these issues because Davisville has an arbitration clause buried in their contract, so there’s not even a way to get them to fix anything they've messed up. It also makes their warranty worthless because any meaningful defect other than a simple broken hinge can simply be waved off as “natural wear and tear” that’s “well within tolerances.”

So here we are at the end of our project – a little bitter that we did something silly and handed $40k to rank amateurs whose proposed solution to their screw-ups involves Dap and duct tape, and no way to fix what’s wrong without blowing another $10k. So I figured the least we can do is post this review far and wide and hope that you, dear reader, will choose more wisely than us.