To me, it would be one extra step to get to what you wanted inside--open drawer front AND slide out. Cool idea, but too much work for me. Never seen one IRL.

I've seen one in a Diamond display at HD. I think the idea is you could put your dishes in the top big drawer and the utensils in the top smaller drawer. You get a little more room in the bigger section. Personally I don't like it.

I have seen two variants: in one the tray pulls out with the big drawer Siematic may have developed this a long time ago for applications where they wanted the entire lower to have single panels on the face.

The other is a big drawer with a separate tray inside that stays closed until you pull out ot The tray is shallow and may look strange or be difficult to face with a drawer front. It is convenient for a single layer of utensils. I have used this for other people's kitchens and they like it.

People often think they won't like something which they didn't buy. Especially right after making their decisions. Or, they fantasize about something that will be wonderful. Especially right before they start buying.

I have internal drawers inside deeper drawers. They work. We like them.

As far as I know, a very shallow internal sliding tray inside the cutlery drawer is an idea that has been around for a long time. It used to be that making them required a lot of precision work. These days, any Ikea or competitor could make millions of them. I don't know why they haven't become commonplace. They could be made of a plastic tray that sits by gravity alone on a couple "rails" made of sticks, and slide on on that by friction alone, as long as the width spanned is not so great as to allow it to sag. My drawers are all 24" w, 30"w, and 36"w.

Independent drawers sliding on glides is also do-able. I have ten of these combinations. I just bought the Ikea drawer and screwed it into a higher hole in the series of holes in the Ikea base cabinet. Done. Easy as pie. No big thinking. Ten interior drawers inside deep drawers that present a large front to the aisle. It's not commonly seen, but Ikea has made it very easy to buy.

Blum makes a clip that holds the inner drawer to the inside of the larger drawer. It works well. It clips into the front panel of the large drawer. Obviously you have the option to unclip the inner drawer so that it doesn't get pulled out when you first pull on the large drawer. And, you can clip it it back onto the large drawer front. A person can make something similar with an elastic or string. We decided not to use the Blum clips, for a number of reasons too detailed to get into in this introductory tutorial.

In the Blum web site or catalog you will see all this. In their Tandembox series or in other series too, like Tandem.

Tandembox is the Blum series that Ikea has. (Ikea has a version of Tandembox almost identical to Blum's current version). Also, wherever you see a "pullout" in terms of drawers or pullout pantries, you will see these internal drawers as part of the kit. Ikea or other places, other hardware.

You can buy separately each of the parts of the Ikea kit. The internal (or interior, or inner) drawers take a small front. The internal drawer front from Blum is not the same as the Ikea version, but they are close, and they both can go on Blum Tandembox drawers. In Ikea I did a site search using "interior drawer front" and found one e.g. here http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/00132406 - in which you can see the three ways of "fronting" a drawer. One is a drawer to be screwed onto your wood front (the one you see from the aisle). The next two are an internal drawer with a high front and fence around it, and then an internal drawer with a low front. The low front lets you have a 3" high internal drawer. Good for cutlery, spatulas, whisks, utensils.

In one of my drawer combinations I have two shallow drawers inside the deep one.

The deep front is here http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/40132386
I've not found it to be needed. It looks good in a tall pullout pantry.

The advantage of the shallow internal drawers is that they give you more. More space. More room. More storage. More display. And at a higher height too.

Here is a link that might be useful: Drawer front (Ikea version) to go on Blum Tandembox drawer

I have seen some custom cabinets that have a very shallow pull-out within another fairly shallow drawer. Usually the very-shallow is a custom knife drawer, etc., and the main drawer below is also for flatware or other utensils. I think that is a nice use of space.

I have the bigger IKEA version of this. We have two full-height pull-outs on the end of our island. One is used to house the KA mixer, which is too tall for a standard drawer. There is one internal drawer above it, and it holds trivets. The other full-height pullout is for the cat food bin, and there is room for two small internal drawers above it. I don't have anything in those drawers, but they are there if I need them! Actually, I think I am going to move the dogs' medicine and other items into those drawers and make the whole thing a pet cabinet.

I think it is a good use of space. But it is two motions rather than one to get to those drawers. So you probably wouldn't want your flatware, or other items that you need more than once a day to be stored in those drawers. IKEA comes with a soft-close gizmo on the Blum drawer hardware, so the interior drawer will be snug in place until you give it a tug. No worries about it rolling out on its own.

There are smaller versions available for retrofitting shallow drawers. I think it'd be useful for things you don't use alllllll the time. Put the fondue forks underneath the cereal spoons.

Here is a link that might be useful: like these:

I have a set of the large drawer that pulls open then has a shallow pull-out at the top of it. Two large drawers makes a base cabinet (each has the small pull-out). I LOVE it and wish I had many more of them. I use the large drawer to store bowls/containers and the small pull-out to hold the lids, zip-loc bags, foil ect.

There is a reason for putting Roll Out Tray Shelf (ROTS) style drawers inside of a larger drawer. You get more vertical space. I really wanted two drawers under my ovens, a deep one for small appliances, and a shallower one for oven pieces and pans. There wasn't enough vertical space...until we decided to use the interior rollout. It's the perfect place for the exceedingly heavy pizza stone/rack/element, which are a great feature of my oven, but a bother to deal with. This is the same theory behind using shallow ones in shallow drawers. You can double your drawer floor space in much less height than you'd have with separate drawers.

The other reason for doing it this way is if you want the function of drawers but the look of doors. For that, regular drawers are more convenient, but if the look does it for you there's no reason not to. Quite a number of European modern style lines do this, from Ikea to very high end. With the Ikea ones (DIY), or any line that has standardized drawer sizes, it also makes it easier for people to customize the heights, as you can see in Jakabedy's example.

If having the drawer within a drawer gives you more storage, more flexibility, or more style, then it's definitely a good thing. :)

I have one small drawer that was too deep. I installed an internal drawer above it and it holds paper plates & plastic fork like things. The kitchen linens are underneath - still a fairly deep drawer.

The other place I used one is above the pull out trash and its just to balance a full height door on the other end of the cabinet run. It's migrated to being the junk drawer - a few tools, pens and pencils and extra bags.

They are very slightly annoying but neither one is a high volume use. They are a little less inconvenient than straight up pull-outs behind cabinet doors - cause you only have to pull another drawer open before accessing the pull-out. Both close together.

We dit it because we have all lower drawers in the base cabinets except the magic corners and I wanted the drawers to line up all around the base.

This is what we ended up with.

Cans are most often used in bottom drawer as it pulls out first, then the rest is organized by type.

There are TWO inner drawers behind the spice drawer front. One holds additional way less frequently used spices as well as the nutmeg grinder and pestle and mortar and the top most drawer holds cookie scoops and probes and less frequently used stuff.

You can see on the drawer front it LOOKS like two drawers but there is only ONE panel and inside are three drawers. Do you feel like Alice in Wonderland yet?

To further confuse you , the magic corner units have doors that were cut to look like drawers. The door is the one behind the open three drawers in the first spice picture and to the right of the closed spice drawers in the second spice picture :)

Oh, duh. I thought you meant like a drawer front that flipped down and then there were two drawers inside. It was obviously past my bedtime when I posted. The pics above show me something different. THAT I would do. And probably will.

i have had some built for my new kitchen and while i haven't used the kitchen yet I LOVE THEM. you could argue it's an extra step and why not just put in a shallower drawer ...but you'd also lose more space.

one of my deep drawers is split three ways: 1/3 of the drawer for deep storage for oils/wine bottles a divider for the remaining 2/3 with the recessed drawer; top for oven mitts, lower section for storage of extra spices and misc.
it really is a very good way to utilize your space.

it's an exceptional upgrade imo.

You guys are amazing!! I never expected to get this much info! I plan to go through it all after Xmas and make my decision. Thanks so much!

I would have one if my cabinet folks had followed through. They didn''t -- we figured we could add the second drawer and we've not gotten around to it. I don't remember why my installer said he had to cut down one of my cabinets, but I said no way and instead we flipped the 3 drawer and the 4 drawer stacks beside the sink and DWs. I now have a deep drawer where I planned 2 shallow ones for wraps and plastic bags and other things not where they were planned. It has worked out fine, but now that I've thought about it for the first time in a LONG time, I can see that I need to shuffle some things around and make it work even better. Maybe I can DIY with a trip to IKEA or some online research. Glad you asked. ;-)