Are you using frameless cabinets?

Here is my pantry cabinet. Tall items on top.

They're really no different than any deep pantry cabinet with roll out tray shelves (ROTS). I'm not a fan b/c they're not the best use of space. The bottom half is doable with ROTS or drawers, but anything above chest high isn't. Things get lost in the depths of deep pantry shelves and while ROTS or drawers help with access in the bottom half, they really don't do much for the top half. You have to still root around those deep ROTS to get to things in the back or middle and having it above your chest will not be easy. Stationary shelves are even worse!

Instead, look for pantry pullouts - no more than 18" wide. The "shelves" pull out with the doors and you can see & access everything by looking at first one side and then the other.

Yes, experience here - at least with the stationary shelves. Our new house has the most dysfunctional pantry cabs ever - 18" & 21" wide x 24"D with stationary shelves top-to-bottom! My DH thought I was exaggerating about the issues until I pushed his stuff into the back of the shelves and now he's on board with me tearing out the 2 individual cabinets (and another in the Kitchen) and replacing them with pullouts!

Edited to add: This image came from the Rev-A-Shelf site.

I dislike pullout behind doors I love my true pullouts from Ikea too bad they no longer make them for NA and the hsrdware was Blum. I still like atrue pullout no hassle opeing a door then pullouts .

I have had both, and for my current situation I prefer drawers over doors. The reason is the multiple steps required to retrieve items from a pullout located behind a cabinet door. First, you have to open the cabinet door; next, you have to pull out the rollout; then, you locate the item you need and extract it; lastly, you push the rollout back into place, and finally you close the cabinet door. That’s five steps.

Compare that to opening a full extension drawer (say 24”); removing the item you need, and pushing the drawer closed. That’s three steps. Now multiply that by the possibly thousand times a year you go through that series of motions (if you cook).

Add to that the fact that pullouts above chest height will require a ladder in order to reach items stored in higher cabinetry.

Since we love our current residence and plan to live there forever, we have tried to incorporate as many aging in place principles as possible for our kitchen renovation plans. Your life stage and the wear and tear on your body may be different than mine, which may lead you to a different decision. Good luck!

To clarify: Keep in mind that "pullouts" and "roll out tray shelves" are not the same.

• Pullouts are attached to the door of the cabinet and pull out when the door is opened. With full-extension, you see everything. An example of a pullout is shown above in a previous message. Trash pullouts are also an example.

• Roll out tray shelves (ROTS) are not attached to the doors and have to be opened after the door is opened. Here's an example of an ROTS:

Generally, drawers are better than both. However, not all cabinets are available with drawers. Plus, in tall, narrow cabinets, sometimes a pullout is better. It depends on the situation.

If you can get a cabinet with drawers up to around waist high and then a pullout above, that might be the best scenario in your case. I don't know if that's possible, but I suggest looking around if you're interested.

Thank you to all who responded! Everything in a kitchen involves tradeoffs, and pantry storage seems to be particularly thorny with tradeoffs.

@BeverlyFLADeziner Yes, frameless cabinets.

@Buehl Good point about above-chest high visibility and access.

@purpleplume I love drawers, too. To be fair, drawers still have 3 of your 5 steps (open, access, close), but 40% fewer steps is huge over thousands of uses. But it's hard to identify contents of cans or boxes from above, and not height adjustable.

@dan1888 A Youtuber (Liz is My Design Sherpa) made a good point about shallow 4-6" deep adjustable shelves for full visibility and access, but with an open floorplan, we don't have too much wall space.

So I'm thinking of converting 24D tall pantry cabinets into a shallow "walk-in style" pantry with 4" deep shelving on doors, 6-12" deep shelving on sides and back, with a countertop and lower drawers or deep shelves for large items. IOW giving up the storage in the middle depths for maximum visibility and accessibility.

OK so I sketched it out and no room for side shelves, just door and back shelves. Looks almost just like my old walk-in pantry, but less wasted space in the center and more shallow door shelving as a ratio to deeper shelves.

So with this arrangement, I imagine smaller one-off items in the door shelves and things we stock up on like beans and corn, in neat rows on the back shelves. Counters could be used for appliances or for additional storage, offering additional flexibility.

I note that Rev-a-Shelf has a similar pantry solution with door mounted shelves but also with swing-out shelves in the middle plus shallower shelves in the back. While I think that increases the amount of shallow shelf space, it loses width due to clearances and has less simultaneous visibility, and not enough deep storage for those items you do stock up on (beans, San Marzano tomato cans, sodas, big bags of chips, etc.). Plus it just looks "busy."

I think this deserves its own thread as it's far afield from my OP question, but it does answer my original question in leaning away from Space Tower/rollout trays. After considering the tradeoffs of all the options, I’m leaning toward door mounted shelves + swingout shallow shelves as the best ratio of pros to cons out there.

Source/background: YouTuber “Liz is my Design Sherpa” says the vast majority of items you store in a pantry are 2-3” deep, hence most of your pantry storage should be shallow shelves. My experience bears this out: by far the most useful parts of all our past pantries have been the shallow shelves we mounted to the back of the pantry door and along a side wall, while the vast majority of our shelf space has been 8-24” deep shelves, so you never know what you have, so you buy more of stuff you already have, resulting in 1) needing far more pantry space due to duplicate items, 2) never finding what you need, and 3) the waste of expired food. So my conclusion is the main problem with most pantries: too much deep storage, and for walk-ins, unusable aisle space which doesn’t store anything and hence makes no sense for anyone without a huge house.

I have further refined this shallow-shelf concept in a 24" deep pantry design to add swing-out shallow shelves, doubling the shallow storage and reducing deep storage. It is more alike than different from Rev-A-Shelf’s version, but it works for wider cabinets (mine are 3’6” wide) and doesn’t require specialized hardware kits, just 170° hinges and piano hinges.

This arrangement (42W x 90H x 24D), in 1 step of opening both doors (does require 2 hands) gives us 4 glorious panels of 19.25W x 84H fully visible space (nearly 6-1/2 ft wide x 7' tall!). In an open plan home where wall space is at a premium, this is almost magic! This does reduce our bulk storage zone behind the swing-out shelves to 12" deep, but we do have 21H x 24D cabinets above for truly oversize items.

In our previous pantries, the best shelving was the least abundant: just about 18"/30" wide shelves (2 houses ago, current) attached to the pantry door, and one side wall (1 house ago). Everything else had limited visibility for anything past the front layer of stuff.