Build a Banquette Seat With IKEA SEKTION Cabinets in 8 Steps for 35% More Storage

Lay a SEKTION base cabinet flat on its back and the carcass becomes a bench. That is the trick, and it predates IKEA. The newer wrinkle is the SEKTION system itself, which replaced FAKTUM in most markets around 2015 and uses a different rail-and-suspension arrangement. Standard base cabinets are 80cm tall, with 37cm or 60cm depths, and the 60cm width is the one most people use for this job. Put two of those units side by side on their backs and you get a 160cm bench, with two deep drawers facing up and reachable by lifting the seat.

The storage gain that gets quoted, around 35% over a fixed bench, is just a volume sum. Inside a hollow upholstered banquette there is a sealed cavity nobody ever uses, and a SEKTION carcass turns most of that air back into drawer space. The MAXIMERA runners and their soft-close action stay in the build, along with the rest of the drawer hardware. How much you actually recover shifts with the seat-access cuts, but the basic edge over a solid-front bench of the same footprint holds.

The 80cm dimension is the awkward one

A dining seat wants to land at about 45cm off the floor. Once a SEKTION base cabinet is tipped over, its standing height becomes the seat depth, so the same carcass that gave you an 80cm cabinet height now gives you an 80cm-deep seat. Even the 60cm version is deep for dining. Most people will find a 60cm dining seat too generous unless the back cushion is brought forward.

That leaves an early decision: cut the carcass down, or keep the full depth and design the cushions around it.

Cutting a particleboard SEKTION carcass is rougher than cutting solid timber. The board is melamine-faced chipboard with a paper edge, and the exit side of the blade chips easily. A scoring cut on the show face with a sharp 60-tooth blade, followed by the through cut, keeps tearout on the hidden side.

Shortening the carcass also removes the original drilled cam-lock holes. After that, you either re-drill for the connector hardware or move to corner brackets and screws into the board edge. Edge screws in chipboard have weak holding power under repeated load, and a dining bench gets loaded again and again.

Two people dropping onto a 160cm bench create cyclic stress at the joints. The original wall-hung cabinet design was never meant to take that pattern of force.

Most builds avoid cutting the carcass. Keep the full depth, raise the run on a recessed plinth, and let the extra depth become a ledge for the back cushions. You sit at 45cm, the cushion behind you fills the top 15cm of depth, and the drawers below remain full size. The original cam holes stay where IKEA put them.

Build sequence

Eight steps, in build order.

1. Assemble the SEKTION carcasses upright as normal, including drawers, then tip each unit onto its back. Use two 60cm units for a 120cm run or three for 180cm.

2. Build a plinth from 18mm birch plywood, recessed 7cm from the front face so toes clear it. Set the plinth height so the carcass top finishes at 45cm.

3. Screw the carcasses to the plinth from inside, through the carcass base into the plywood. Use 5mm pilot holes and 4x40mm screws every 30cm.

4. Join adjacent carcasses with two-part connector bolts through the side panels. Use two per joint, top and bottom.

5. Fix the whole assembly to the wall. A French cleat in 18mm ply, screwed into studs at 60cm centres, carries the lateral load created when drawers are pulled open.

6. Cut the seat lids from 18mm birch ply, one lid per cabinet, so each drawer remains independently accessible. Leave a 2mm gap on all sides for the upholstery wrap.

7. Hinge the lids or simply rest them in place. A piano hinge along the back gives lift-up access on top of drawer access. Most people skip the hinge because the front drawers already handle the daily storage.

8. Upholster the lids with 50mm high-density foam, 2cm of polyester wadding over the foam for a rounded edge, and fabric stapled to the underside.

The cleat is doing real work

Skipping the French cleat in step 5 is tempting once the bench is sitting heavy on the floor and feels solid enough on its own. It is not. Yank a stiff drawer hard and a freestanding run tips toward you at the top. Bolt the back of that run to the studs and the same sideways pull goes straight into the wall framing, so nothing moves.

Finishing the exposed plywood

The plinth and any visible birch ply ends need a finish that survives shoe scuffs and the odd pass of a wet mop. Two coats of Danish oil, with the second wet-sanded at 400 grit, leave a low-sheen surface that wipes clean and lets the ply grain read through. The oil cures into the wood rather than sitting on top, so a scuff buffs out instead of flaking.

Danish oil dries slower than lacquer, around 6 to 8 hours between coats. It also darkens birch noticeably, which can suit a kitchen with warmer cabinet fronts.

For colour, Farrow and Ball Estate Eggshell is the common choice for the plinth because it is formulated for interior wood and trim and resists scuffing better than the brand’s flat finishes. Raw birch needs primer first, or the first coat sinks unevenly into the end grain. Estate Eggshell has a slight sheen at around 20% gloss, enough to clean without looking plasticky against matte cabinet doors. Use two coats over primer, with a light sand between coats.

A 180cm run with three cabinets

Three 60cm SEKTION base cabinets, METOD or SEKTION depending on the market, cost roughly the price of three carcasses plus three sets of MAXIMERA drawers. The plinth and seat lids come out of one and a half standard sheets of 18mm birch ply. Foam for the seat is 180cm by 45cm of 50mm high-density material, which usually means one large upholstery offcut or a cut-to-size order.

A solid upholstered bench 180cm long, 45cm deep and 45cm tall has an interior volume that stays sealed unless access is built into it. The SEKTION run gives three drawers, each roughly 50cm wide internally by 37cm deep by 18cm tall in the MAXIMERA medium, plus the dead space above the drawer boxes that the seat lids open onto.

Adding that lid-access space to the drawer volume is where the 35% figure lands against a comparable solid bench with a single lift-up lid. Three separate drawers are also easier to use than one large lift-up box, because the placemats, napkins and occasional crockery can live in separate places.

Carcass assembly takes about an hour. The plinth, cleat and wall fixing take a careful afternoon. Upholstery can take longer than expected if you have never stapled foam before, mainly at the corners where fabric bunches. Plan a full weekend and there is margin.

Cushions, fabric and heat

Seat foam at 50mm and around 35kg per cubic metre keeps its shape under daily sitting. Below that density it can compress permanently within a season. For the back cushions resting on the deep ledge, a softer 30mm foam wrapped in a heavier fabric looks better, and it is not taking direct body weight.

Fabric choice affects comfort in a kitchen banquette set against an exterior wall. Dense velvet pile traps a layer of still air against the panel, the same property that makes velvet curtains hold heat, so a velvet seat back feels warmer to lean against in winter than flat woven cotton. Velvet also shows crushing and water marks. That is why many kitchen banquettes use a tight flatweave or performance fabric on the seat, then reserve velvet for a removable back cushion that stays away from spills.

Parquet under the plinth

If the run sits on parquet, the plinth load is concentrated along two narrow plywood edges. A heavy banquette filled with crockery becomes a static point load, and softwood-backed parquet will eventually dent under it.

A continuous base under the plinth spreads that weight across a wide footprint instead of leaving it riding on two thin edges. What it does not solve is the seasonal movement of the parquet itself, which keeps expanding and shrinking under a bench bolted hard to the wall above it. How that long-term tug between a fixed wall fixing and a floating timber floor plays out is the part of the build nobody finds out until a year or two in.