Company makes functional, beautiful outdoor kitchens

When asked how Select Outdoor Kitchens got its start, owner and general manager Mike Miller goes straight to the point.

He had a Big Green Egg cooker that he loved with a wooden stand that he didn’t.

“I was basically sick and tired of maintaining a wooden cart. That’s the short story,” Miller says.

Drawing on years of experience working with his dad, Lowell, at Polyfab Plastics and Supply, the parent company of Select Outdoor Kitchens, Miller put his knowledge to work.

Miller designed a set of cabinets made with a marine-grade polymer that they’d used in the boating industry for 30 years. It’s entirely weatherproof, and Miller says it can withstand the harshest of elements.

But it wasn’t only functionality Miller was after. He also wanted cabinets and counter surfaces that were as attractive as anything you’d find indoors.

In 2008, Miller launched the first cabinets in the line.

“It started out as standard cabinets for the Big Green Egg cookers and has morphed into nothing but custom-order kitchens,” Miller says.

Miller says that while the launch of the line coincides with the downturn of the economy, that turned out to be a good thing for his product.

“People were doing the staycation thing and … and it’s just continued from there. People just continued improving their homes and staying home and entertaining at home,” he says.

Select Outdoor Kitchen sets differ from other popular built-in models that might feature custom rock work in that they’re portable. The line also has been expanded to include virtually any grill or appliance one can imagine.

The line is carried by more than 100 distributors nationwide, including a handful in Springfield. Orders for custom outdoor kitchens are typically made with the distributor, who then works with Select Outdoor Kitchens to make whatever vision the client has real.

“Most people that come to us already have an idea of what they want. We get designs from customers mainly from our dealers. Sometimes it’s a rough sketch on a napkin that they’ve drawn out or they have a complex layout of what they want,” Miller says.

From there, Select employees create CAD renderings to exact specifications and return them for approval.

Miller says they offer nine different colors and six door styles, but they’ll do any kind of custom routing a customer might want. Options include sinks, outdoor refrigerators, power burners for crawfish boils, rotisseries — “really, the possibilities are endless,” he says.

“We’ve shipped to basically every state in the U.S. and Hawaii and Canada,” Miller says.

“We’ve seen a demand and there’s plenty of room to grow, but you know it’s a good thing to see it take off like that, but we didn’t think it would take off this quick,” he says.

TO LEARN MORE• Select Outdoor Kitchens, www.selectoutdoorkitchens.com or 417-862-6512